France

FRANCE. - Region and State of western Europe, the only one that enjoys the benefit of a triple maritime frontage (Mediterranean, Atlantic, North Sea) and the possession of the shortest and most convenient land routes between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic (Aquitanian Gate) and between central and western Europe (Burgundian Gate).

I. GEOGRAPHY.

Spread over the most populous part of the continent, it occupies a central position in it, with a frontier more maritime (3,120 km. of coastline) than land (2,300 km.) and a character more Atlantic (1,385 km. of coast) than Mediterranean. By its surface area (551,696 sq. km. after the territorial acquisitions made at Italy's expense along the Alpine frontier) it is the largest State in Europe (setting aside the U.S.S.R.), but it is surpassed (besides by the U.S.S.R.) by Germany, the United Kingdom and Italy in number of inhabitants and by many other States in density of population. The territory over which it exercises its dominion is, by extent, the third in the world: 12.4 million sq. km. with 115 million inhabitants.

A line drawn from Bayonne to Metz separates in F. the domain of the lowlands (below 1,200 m.) from that of the highlands (only 1/10 of the total, however, being above 800 m.). To the N. and NW. extend plains (Paris basin, Aquitanian basin), plateaus, hills, and reliefs of ancient origin and slight height (Armorican Massif, Ardennes); to the S. and SE. considerable mountain masses of recent emergence (Alps, Pyrenees, Jura), of which F. shares possession with the neighboring countries (Italy, Spain, Switzerland). The two domains are joined at the center of the country in the broad Central Massif (1/7 of the territory), which participates in a certain way in the characteristics peculiar to the two different types of relief. The result, on the whole, is a fairly varied morphology, to which corresponds an equal richness of passage, of natural resources, of economic aptitudes, and a harmonious arrangement of basins and passages, at all times favorable to exchanges.

The climate is affected, according to the regions, by oceanic influences (Brittany, Aquitaine, Flanders: uniform, mild, humid), Mediterranean influences (Provence, Languedoc: mild winters, hot and dry summers, rainy autumns) and continental influences (central plateau and regions of the E.: strong seasonal contrasts, snowy winters and summer rains), but it is everywhere temperate and with precipitation not below, as a rule, 600 mm. average per year and well distributed throughout the year.

According to the recent constitution (Dec. 24, 1946), the French Republic, which is part, together with the associated States (Protectorates of Morocco and Tunisia, Republic of Vietnam), of the French Union, comprises, besides the metropolitan territory, 4 departments (Martinique, Guadeloupe, Réunion, Guinea) and 8 overseas territories (A. O. F., A. E. F., Madagascar and the Comoros, Somalia, Establishments in India, New Caledonia, Establishments in Oceania, St-Pierre and Miquelon); in all 11.1 million sq. km. with 75-80 million inhabitants. (Togo and Cameroon are under trusteeship, and the New Hebrides under condominium). The French Union is presided over by the President of the Republic: an expression of it is an Assembly composed half of representatives of metropolitan F. The French Republic, in turn, realizes its sovereignty through a bicameral Parliament (National Assembly of 619 deputies, and Council of the Republic of 250-320 councilors), to which belongs the choice of the president, who remains in office no more than 7 years. The French Republic is defined, in the new Constitution, as «indivisible, secular, democratic and social». Administratively, the metropolitan territory is divided into 37,989 communes, grouped into 3,028 cantons, 311 arrondissements and 90 departments.

The French population is distinguished in Europe by its stationariness. The decrease of 1.4 million inhabitants recorded in the 1946 census compared with that of 1936 corresponds to the losses of human lives that occurred in the Second World War. After 1946 a certain demographic recovery has manifested itself. As of Jan. 1, 1949, it may be calculated that F. counted 41 million inhabitants (density: 74 per sq. km.), of whom 1.7 million were foreigners (and of these 650 thousand Italians). This population is distributed with relative uniformity. Urban centers are numerous, 23 of them with over 100 [thousand] inhabitants; but even these, for the most part, are marked by more or less notable losses of population compared with 1936.

F. is still essentially an agricultural country: slightly less than half of its inhabitants devote themselves to agriculture, many of whom are small landowners. The crops are varied, but among these the cereal crops prevail (plains of the N., of the W. and of Aquitaine), among which dominate wheat (33 million quintals in 1947: 87 in 1913) and oats (30 and 52 million quintals respectively), as well as the potato (60 and 130 million quintals on the same dates), to which have been added, in our century, various industrial crops (sugar beet, tobacco, hops, etc.); all of them, however, insufficient for internal consumption. F., on the other hand, is largely an exporter on account of its wine, which grants it a recognized world primacy (44 million hl. in 1947: 63, on average, in 1934-38). Livestock raising is also flourishing, in relation to the considerable production of hay and fodder: F. is in first place in Europe (without the U.S.S.R.) for number of cattle (15 million head) and horses (2.4 million), in second for pigs (after Germany), in third for sheep, etc. Consequently notable is the source of gain derived from products of animal origin (butter, cheeses, eggs). Fishing is also well developed, especially in the N.-western sector (Brittany).

With the exceptional richness of its reserves of iron minerals (Lorraine; F. extracts ca. 1/4 of the world total of these minerals) contrasts the relative poverty that F. laments as regards fossil fuels (Flanders, Cavenne; barely 5% of the world total). F. does not even produce 2/3 (45 million tons in 1947) of the coal it consumes; moreover it is almost entirely devoid of petroleum (51 thousand tons in 1948), while it can count on considerable hydroelectric reserves (8 million HP, of which 6 installed). In spite of these disharmonies, large-scale industry is represented in F. in all its branches, headed by textiles (F. of the N. and of the E.), where, as indeed in other fields (furniture, goldsmithing, perfumery, crystalware, etc.), the tendency to prefer quality, taste and elegance stands out most. After the wartime interlude F. has by now regained, and at times surpassed (artificial textiles), the positions of 1938. The major industrial districts are localized in Flanders (machines, fabrics, glassworks, sugar refineries), around Paris (luxury goods, publishing), and near the major ports, as well as near Lyon (silk mills) and St-Etienne.

Internal communications benefit from the favorable altimetric conditions of the terrain and from the arrangement of the major river basins, radiating like spokes from the Massif Central. France has about 640,000 km. of roads, 9,000 km. of navigable waterways, and 62,500 km. of railways, of which 20,000 are local lines and 3,500 electrified. Characteristic is the convergence of all these communications toward Paris. As for foreign trade, predominantly maritime, it is favored by the good equipment of the major ports (Marseille, Rouen, Bordeaux, Le Havre, Cherbourg, Dunkirk) and by a merchant marine that numbers over 500 ships (of which 30 are transatlantic liners) for a total tonnage of 2.1 million tons.

Exchanges with foreign countries consist mainly of raw materials and foodstuffs in imports, and of agricultural products and quality manufactured goods in exports. From 1944 onward the trade balance has always been passive (223.4 billion francs of deficit in 1948).

Giuseppe Caraci

II. CIVIL AND ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY.

I. IN THE MIDDLE AGES

1. Civil history

From the end of the 6th century the essential characteristics of F. manifest themselves in Merovingian Gaul. This, from the north, had reached the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean; victorious wars extend the authority of Clovis's descendants over the Germans beyond the Rhine. Fused in the Catholic religion, Franks (v.) and Gallo-Romans have stifled Arianism and form a single people. A peace, however, that is precarious: the Merovingians set the worst examples of discord and brutality; the name of Queen Brunhilda (end of the 6th century) is linked to the ugliest memories. The peaceful Reign of Dagobert (629-39) is only a brief episode before the decline of the «rois fainéants», whom degeneration rapidly carries to the grave after having prevented them from reacting against the ambition of the «mayors of the palace». The kingdom is not a State, but rather a patrimony divided at every succession (Neustria, Austrasia, Burgundy, Aquitaine).

Chaos produces salvation: it is one of the characteristics of French history. The unity of barbarian Gaul was accomplished by a barbarian, Clovis. Merovingian F. is saved from anarchy by one of those mayors of the palace who were tearing it apart. Later it will be one of the least fortunate lords, the Capetian, who will save the monarchy from feudal dismemberment. Various favorable circumstances combine to explain the fortune of the Carolingians. The energy of the mayors of the palace of Austrasia resolves the incapacity of the «fainéants». They rise to the rank of saviors: Charles Martel halts at Poitiers (732) the Muslim spearhead that tended to infiltrate into the West; Pepin the Short, his son, saves the Holy See threatened by Agilulf, king of the Lombards. Stephen II, grateful, declares that «he who governed had to be king» (Chronique de St-Denis, V, 82) and comes to F. to consecrate the new dynasty (754).

Under Charlemagne, son of Pepin (768-814), it could be believed that the nation and the reality of the imperial State had been restored, lost, in the West, after the coup d'état of Odoacer, in 476. The Frankish Kingdom covers, and at times surpasses, the ancient Roman territory: Italy, where Charlemagne girds the iron crown of the Lombard Desiderius (773); the Spanish March, conquered despite the battle of Roncesvalles (778); Bavaria, taken from Duke Tassilo; Pannonia, pacified after the conquest (796) of the nomadic capital of the Avars (the Ring); Germany, wrested from the Saxons fanaticized by Widukind. A capital with a Latin name, Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen), fixed, according to Roman tradition, near the ancient Xanten limes; a sacred palace, of the other dignitaries, of general laws (capitularia), a centralized administration (counts, missi dominici): all power is concentrated in the hands of the prince. The illusion is even greater after the imperial coronation at Christmas of 800 at St. Peter's, by Leo III.

In reality, the monument is only a façade: unfinished, it presents cracks. Weak, incapable or divided, the descendants of the Frankish Emperor will not be able to hold back the centrifugal forces, to face external assaults, and even less to consolidate the edifice. For lack of finances, the imperial goods are squandered to remunerate military services; no other bond than that, quite fragile, of personal loyalty, still binds his servants to the sovereign: vassalage takes shape. The use of divisions persists, and, already during his Reign, Louis the Pious (814-40) witnesses, powerless or victim, the disputes of his sons over his inheritance. The Empire falls apart; Europe is announced. F. withdraws into itself, now mutilated. The Serment de Strasbourg (842), bilingual, distinguishes the Romance dialect from the Germanic one; the Treaty of Verdun (843) places, as a point of discord, Lotharingia (Kingdom of Lothair) between the two F.s of the east and the west: that of Louis the German and that of Charles the Bald. Only the latter will preserve the name. In Aquitaine regionalism appears. The crown launches a last spurt when Charles the Bald restores imperial unity (Christmas 876); but it is the last gesture: his successor, Charles the Fat, discredits himself by abandoning Burgundy to the Normans.

Three waves brought the Normans into F., after the death of Charlemagne. Until 860, their ships sail up the rivers into the lands for raids as devastating as they were fleeting. From 860 to 911, their attacks expand; they besiege Paris in 885. In 911 Charles the Simple abandons to them the present province of Normandy. At this same time, the Saracens in the 9th century, the Hungarians in the 10th, plundered, the former the southern coasts, the latter the east and center of the Kingdom. In the face of invasion the monarchical power remains impotent; only local defense is effective. The counts, hereditary in fact, become independent; they reserve for themselves the income of the taxes because it is their task to maintain the castles and lead their own men into combat. The great fiefs are formed (duchies of Normandy and Burgundy, counties of Flanders, of Auvergne, of Poitiers, of Toulouse and of Barcelona). Authority dissolves and the monarchy is now nothing more than a dignity, contested in the 10th century among the great.

Hugh Capet had already exercised the guardianship of kings Lothair and Louis V, and two of his ancestors had occupied the throne, when, in 978, he was elected king. A weak king, powerful vassals. The first four Capetians (Hugh, Robert the Pious, Henry I, Philip I), at least managed to draw from their rights of sovereignty and from the support of the Church that had consecrated them the possibility of enlarging their domains and fixing the crown in their descendants.

In the 12th century, with two active kings, Louis the Fat (1108-1137) and Louis VII the Young (1137-80), the monarchy reawakens. The name of king becomes synonymous with peace. Louis VII drives out the adventurer lords of his land, the people have confidence in his justice and, under his protection, the Communes free themselves from the lords. Nevertheless the struggle against the great feudal lords becomes more difficult when Henry II Plantagenet, king of England, adds to his domains of Maine and Anjou, all of Aquitaine brought to him as dowry by Eleanor, his wife, whose previous marriage to Louis VII has been annulled.

The support of the monarchy is under the Reigns of Philip Augustus (1180-1223), of Louis (1226-70), and Philip the Fair (1285-1314). In the Kingdom, enlarged with Artois, Picardy and other regions confiscated from John Lackland (Normandy, Poitou, Saintonge), and whose strength manifests itself in the battle of Bouvines (27 July 1214), the manly equity of St. Louis makes tranquility and order reign. War gives way to peaceful works: the land and the crafts nourish a more numerous people, the markets of Champagne attract foreigners; the gold coin, forgotten since the times of Charlemagne, is minted again; the French language, the University of Paris, the ogival art shine throughout all Christendom. The administration of the «baillis», the justice of the royal inquirers and of the Parliament, finish perfecting themselves at the time of Philip the Fair, while the king takes possession of Lyon, of Champagne and of Flanders.

But more extensive duties require new resources. Recourse must be had to expedients (changing of coins, confiscations of goods: of the Templars, of the Jews and of the Lombards). The monarchy, now national, draws public opinion (first assemblies of the States) into the struggle undertaken by the legists, imbued with Roman law, to circumscribe the limits of the power of Pope Boniface VIII and of civil power.

With the death of Philip the Fair, fortune abandons the Capetians. In 14 years (1314-28), amid feudal agitation, the king's three sons (Louis X the Quarrelsome, Philip V the Tall, Charles IV the Fair) fail the tradition, never yet contradicted, of a male succession. The inheritance is not transmitted through women, and thus Charles the Bad, future king of Navarre, and the king of England, Edward III, are set aside in favor of a minor, Philip of Valois, since the latter is "native to the Kingdom." From this originates the Hundred Years' War. Calamities accumulate. The unpreparedness of Philip VI and the mad valor of John II the Good are paid for with the disasters of Crécy (1346), Calais (1347) and Poitiers (1350); the king of F. dies a prisoner in London. The territories abandoned in the Peace of Brétigny (1360) are never compensated for by the acquisition of Montpellier and the Dauphiné. The economic and social disaster brings other scourges: famine, monetary devaluation, the high cost of living, plague, depopulation with their train of disorders (Jacquerie), and the bourgeoisie, led by Stephen Marcel, attempts, by means of the Estates General, to control the royal finances.

Charles V the Wise (1364-80) succeeds in putting an end to the plundering of the great companies, and in restoring authority and, with the help of Bertrand du Guesclin, in retaking from the English a part of the lost territories. The reign of his son, Charles VI (1380-1422), begins well, but he goes mad and the 14th century closes amid disorder; indeed, to the rivalries of the princes is added the confusion of the schism. The future of F. is, then, uncertain.

2. Ecclesiastical history

Medieval F. owed almost all its features to the Church; and the Church, in return, found in its "eldest daughter" a land of election. After having baptized F. at Reims, in the person of Clovis, the Church educates Frankish society. The episcopal schools and the monasteries save from the disaster of Merovingian ignorance what still survives of ancient letters and arts. The unbridled lay immorality is counterbalanced by the great austerity of St. Columbanus and his disciples. Brutality has as its barriers the right of asylum and the immunity of the lands of the Church, and, as a curb, the energetic remonstrances of the bishops (Gregory of Tours, Fortunatus). The monarchy bows before them; it endows the great abbeys (St-Denis, St-Wandville, Jumièges, St-Riquier, St-Croix-de-Poitiers). In reciprocal exchange of services, it is from the civil power, represented by the heirs of Charlemagne, that Boniface receives the help necessary for the reform of a clergy too bound to the life of the world and for the expansion of the faith in Germany. The double consecration of Pepin the Short by Boniface and the Pope gives the French monarchy a religious character.

In the same way in which it watched over the birth and the first education of the French nation, the Church, united with the Carolingian State, gives the new Empire its reason for being. The Catholic creed founds the unity of the populus christianus; the Latin language expresses it; the bishops are the auxiliaries of the counts; conquests aim at the Crusade; the "Carolingian renaissance" is the work of the clergy; finally legend will canonize the "new Constantine." His son Louis, educated by bishops, will be "the Pious"; he humbles his power before the Pope and the heads of the abbeys (Wala) govern the country. Under the following generations the episcopate still sustains the deficiencies of the monarchy: Incmar first, Adalbero afterward, are holders of the bishopric of Reims, the most notable.

Analogy of situations, analogy of the solution. The Baptism of Rollo transforms the Normans from barbarians into members of the Christian people. The sacred anointing transfers legitimacy to the "third race" of the king of F., the Capetians. The consecration of Reims takes on the appearance of a Sacrament. The king heals scrofula and swears to defend the Church; the Church inserts his name in the Canon of the Mass. He reigns "by the grace of God." For three centuries the Church and the monarchy are united; for until Philip the Fair they are not divided by any conflict either long or deep. In a general climate of concord, the Church finds in F. the fruitful center of its perpetual rejuvenation.

As formerly the Merovingian bishop, it is above all the monk who, from the 10th century onward, defends the virtues and the Christian faith against the contamination of the world. And behold Cluny, founded in 910, whose daughter houses, everywhere, oppose the spirit of religion and peace to the slow materialism of the early feudal age. The end of the first millennium sees F. clothed in a "white habit of new churches." Across F., the Cluniac sanctuaries (Tours, Vézelay, Saint-Gilles, Toulouse) are ranged along the pilgrimage routes. Burgundy and Aquitaine are the privileged lands of Cluniac influence. There the institutions of peace germinate (the Peace and Truce of God, associations of peace), while the knights "ordained" according to almost sacramental rites, make it a point of honor to protect the weak. The abbeys add to the benefit of peace that of a daily bread assured by the labors of their own fields to the multiplied population. Then the people put their strength of expansion and the barons their honor at the service of the Faith; the Crusade, conceived in Burgundy and in the Midi in the course of the 11th century, makes its first campaign in Spain, and is organized, under the direction of a French pope, Urban II, at the Council of Clermont (1093). From then on, the majority of the effectives of every Crusade comes from F. and with the name of Franks are called, in the East, all westerners.

The monastic order, in the 10th and 11th centuries, had been less corrupted than the secular clergy, by wealth and by the relaxation of morals. And it is from a French-speaking country, Lorraine, with Bruno of Toul (Leo IX) and from Cluny where the Italian Hildebrand (Gregory VII) had been formed, that the decisive current of ecclesiastical reform sets out. For his part Ivo of Chartres proposes the conciliatory solution of the double investiture, the temporal and the spiritual, which will bring the Pope and the Emperor together in the Concordat of Worms (1122).

For the Church the problems are renewed as rapidly as she herself. The diffusion of the old rationalism (the "new Aristotle") under the influence of Arab science, that of Cathar Manichaeism, source of the Albigensian heresy, create new grave problems for the Faith. The great impetus taken by the cities and by commerce increases the love of wealth, which ends by insinuating itself even into the Cistercian Order. In the effort tending toward a solution the tares grow together with the wheat; but it will be the 13th century that brings the triumphant answers. Emulators, they tend together toward austerity, both the monks of the abbey of Pontlevrault, founded by Robert of Arbrissel, and the Carthusians of St. Bruno, the Premonstratensians of St. Norbert and, above all, the Cistercians reformed by St. Robert of Molesme and St. Bernard of Clairvaux; while a Peter Waldo, at Lyon, is only the abbey of a St. Francis, who would lack humility.

The name of St. Bernard dominates the whole epoch. He is the counselor of popes, of bishops, of kings. Civil power, moreover, finds in the Church its best support; the chancellors are men of the Church, e.g., Suger, abbot of St-Denis, friend of Louis VII. More than the proud rationalism of an Abelard, St. Bernard brings to the crowd the consoling devotion of the feast of Corpus Christi: it will be an answer to the Albigensian condemnation of matter, with the worship of a God hidden under the species of bread. And, to put a complete end to it, with the Albigensian heresy that tears Languedoc apart, the long crusade of the northern barons led by Simon of Montfort against Raymond VI of Toulouse, in 1209, is not enough. Even the Inquisition, established in 1229, is only a brutal and negative means. Only preaching will lead souls back to the Faith. Founded on French soil, at Toulouse, by a Spaniard, St. Dominic, and not without a connection to the ideal of the Poverello of Assisi, the Order of Friars Preachers finally realizes the synthesis between study and poverty, reason and Faith, speculation and prayer.

Enriched by the talent of the Mendicants (St. Albert the Great, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure) and protected, after the pontificate of Innocent III, by the papacy and by the king, the University of Paris is, according to Pope Alexander IV, « the tree in the Earthly Paradise ». Of its four faculties (arts, medicine, law, theology), the most celebrated is the fourth, and of the schools, among which the students of these four « nations » are divided, the most famous are the Dominican « studium » of St. James and the College founded in 1267 by Robert de Sorbon (the Sorbonne). The Church directs the whole of social life from the king (St. Louis was a Franciscan tertiary) down to the humble craftsman of the trade confraternities. It is she who inspires the arts. Succeeding, toward the end of the 12th century, the cult for the Roman vault, at full sixth, spread by the Cistercians, the ogival style is born, in the Ile-de-France; at Notre-Dame and the Sainte-Chapelle of Paris, at St-Denis, the royal necropolis, at Chartres, at Bourges, Laon, Reims, Amiens and Rouen, it expresses the ascent of religious thought and feeling.

The temporal and the spiritual, in the Middle Ages, are united like the soul and the body. Philip the Fair perhaps believed he could serve the Church as much as his crown by defending against the Pope the financial and judicial immunities of his clergy (the affair of the tithes, the trial of Bernard Saisset), and by condemning the Templars, reproved by public opinion. Neither of the two parties distinguished the domain of God from that of Caesar, and they reached the extremes of misunderstanding: the Pope excommunicated the king and threatened to depose him (bull Unam Sanctam, 1302); the king allowed William of Nogaret to perpetrate against the Pontiff the attack of Anagni (1303), plotted by the Colonna. The French Church, with the exception of the Regulars, followed Philip the Fair, and its docility announces religious « nationalisms ». The foreigner, however, could in this way imagine that the French popes of Avignon, from Clement V to Gregory XI, were nothing other than the docile servants of the king of F. The Hundred Years' War aggravated the situation, and the papacy, apparently compromised, did not succeed in its many efforts at mediation. The schism, from 1378 onward, placed F. among the partisans of the Avignon Clement VII. Thus was born « Gallicanism », fortified by a passing « withdrawal of obedience » on the part of the French Church with regard to the two rival Pontiffs. And yet, once again, the university proposed solutions for Christendom: agreement and council. At the end of the 14th century, confusion reigns in F., both in the Church and in political life.

For religious history: N. Valois, La F. et le Grand Schisme d'Occident, 4 vols., Paris 1896-1902; G. Kurth, Clovis,

2 vols., 3rd ed., ibid. 1901; E. Vacandard, Vie de St Bernard, 2 vols., 3rd ed., ibid. 1902; E. Martin, St Colomben, ibid. 1905; E. Mâle, L'art religieux en France du XIIe s. au XIIIe et à la fin du moyen âge, 3 vols., ibid. 1908-23; E. Leane, Histoire de la propriété ecclésiastique en France, 6 vols., Lille 1910-43; P. Mortier, Hist. abrégée de l'Ordre de St Dominique en France, Tours 1926; J. Rivière, Le problème de l'Eglise et de l'Etat au temps de Philippe le Bel, Louvain 1926; L. Bréhier, L'Eglise et l'Orient au moyen âge, Les Croisades, 5th ed., Paris 1928; G. Govan, St Louis, ibid. 1928; A. Fliche, La chrétienté médiévale, ibid. 1929; J. Guirard, Hist. de l'Inquisition au moyen âge, 2 vols., ibid. 1935-38; G. Digard, Philippe le Bel et le Saint-Siège de 1293 à 1302, 2 vols., ibid. 1937; Fliche-Martin-Franze, VI; A. Fliche-V. Martin, Hist. de l'Eglise, VII, Paris 1948; VIII, ibid. 1946; IX, ibid. 1948; P. Belperron, La Croisade des Albigouis, ibid. 1942; E. Gitson, La philosophie au moyen-âge, ibid. 1944; A. Fliche, La querelle des Investitures, ibid. 1946; Ch. Poulet, Hist. de l'Eglise de F., moyen-âge, ibid. 1946; R. Grousset, Hist. des Croisades, 3 vols., 2nd ed., ibid. 1948-49; L. Halphen, P. Glorieux, G. Le Bras and others, Aspects de l'Université de Paris, ibid. 1949; G. Mollet, Les Papes d'Avignon, 9th ed., ibid. 1950.

Guglielmo Mollet

II. IN THE MODERN AGE

The intermittent madness of King Charles VI, which began in 1392, prevented the French nation from reaping those advantages that the general situation of Europe, aggravated by the schism, would have allowed it. Indeed, rivalries for the government of the Kingdom immediately broke out between the king's uncles and brothers, who aimed at their own particular profit; first among them Philip of Burgundy, who wished to provide for the development of his Flemish State on the Lower Rhine. Subsequently, the French history of the 15th century is full of disasters and turmoils; from 1415 to 1429 there was the resumption of the Hundred Years' War with a slow recovery until 1453, followed by a period of laborious reorganization, in which monarchical absolutism, the high feudal nobility and the Estates General faced one another; this hard and laborious work, fruitful for the future, was abandoned toward the end of the century, with the aim of pursuing the ambitious dreams of the Italian enterprise and of European primacy, which after 66 years of war would leave France defeated and the monarchy weak and discredited.

When Philip of Burgundy, the king's uncle and de facto regent, died in 1404, his son John was set aside by Louis d'Orléans, the king's brother, husband of Valentina Visconti, himself a wretched administrator; on 23 Nov. 1407 he fell victim to an ambush by his Burgundian cousin, who took over the government, favored Paris and its merchants, and thereby determined the reaction of the feudal nobility, which rallied around the sons of Orléans under the leadership of the Count of Armagnac, from whom the faction took its name. There followed a long civil war, while in Paris the arrogance of the mob and of the Guild of Butchers and of their leader Caboche provoked a reaction that delivered the city into the hands of the Armagnacs.

Upon this troubled and bloodied France fell the English invasion of Henry V, who sought a diversion from his difficult internal situation with a popular and successful war, and for 14 years French disasters followed one another: the fall of Harfleur, the defeat of Agincourt (1415), the fall of Rouen, the assassination of John, Duke of Burgundy, with the ensuing Treaty of Troyes (1420), by which the king disinherited the Dauphin Charles and recognized as his heir Henry V, betrothed to his daughter Catherine; the new Duke of Burgundy adhered to it, so that the whole country up to the Loire, including Paris, fell into English hands. In 1422, upon the death of the two kings, the Dauphin (Charles VII) was proclaimed at Bourges and the young son of Henry V was proclaimed at St-Denis as king of France and England. In 1429 the decline of France was at its height: the English were preparing at Orléans to cross to the south of the Loire, when a girl not yet twenty, Joan of Arc, who was convinced by her visions of the divine mission to save France, went to Bourges and shook the inertia of the king and his court. Sent with an expedition to Orléans, she put the English to flight, led the king to Reims to be crowned and, although she fell into English hands and was sent by them to the stake as a witch, she truly began the recovery of France, where in '53 nothing remained under English control but Calais.

From so many ruins the monarchy rose again to new prestige, using them to establish a royal and absolute administration, that is, free from the limitations of feudal rights, communal franchises and the Estates General. Henceforth it would have its own finances, its own army, its own justice superior to the feudal one, and control over local administrations. The Concordat of 1516, moreover, while satisfying the papal desire to see the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges abolished with its Gallican and Basilian principles, placed the Church of France in the hands of the monarchy, which presented the candidates for bishoprics and abbeys for papal investiture. Thus there were 94 bishoprics, 527 abbeys, besides other priories, which allowed the king to compensate ministers with rich prebends, to favor younger sons of noble families and even foreign diplomats. Furthermore, by incorporating noble younger sons into the new militias that Charles VII created in 1445 in place of the old brigand-like companies of fortune, the king tamed the rebelliousness of the families; while the greater nobles were removed from the provinces and made courtiers at the king's mercy and withdrawn from economic ruin. It would be the specific task of Louis XI (1461-83) to plot the ruin of the high feudal nobility, to which the provinces had been distributed as an appanage for royal younger sons.

To the disloyal methods of his former companions he responded with others equally false and cruel in order to escape the obligations imposed on him and the promises extorted from him by their rebellious coalitions, even if called those of the Public Weal. Tragic was his duel with Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, who dreamed of an independent kingdom of his own between France and the Empire and who fell at Nancy (1477) under the pikes of the Swiss, secretly paid by Louis XI. Louis XI absorbed its French states: and little by little he reconstituted the territorial unity of France, retaking Maine and Anjou, taking back Normandy and Guienne from his brother, exterminating the houses of Armagnac, Alençon, Nemours, St Pol, subduing the Duke of Brittany, and occupying Artois, Franche-Comté, Charolais (these foolishly restored later by Charles VIII), Picardy and the counties of Burgundy and Boulogne, domains these already Burgundian. Having subdued the feudal nobility, he knew how to impose himself on the Estates General, convoking them ever more rarely. So that when in 1484 his daughter Anne of Beaujeu, regent of the underage Charles VIII, disregarded the proposal to limit the taille (which had become the major source of royal revenues and was fixed at the king's discretion), the monarchy, secure in its revenues, could truly be called absolute. Louis XI, even amid internal rebelliousness and the Burgundian danger, did not cease to intervene abroad; indeed, Charles's intrusiveness drove him to counter his action by every means, in Switzerland, Lorraine and Italy, so as to reduce the Duchy of Savoy to a kind of vassalage, although his own sister Yolande, duchess regent, resisted him. He also interposed between Florence and Naples and often made his weight felt in Rome, making use both of the Pragmatic Sanction and of ecclesiastical ordinances. He occupied Cerdagne and Roussillon as security for a loan and aspired to Catalonia. Once the Bold was gone, this policy became heavier and more active, though without true interventions: death overtook him when the inheritance of Provence, which gave him the ports of Marseilles and Toulon, placed him before the Mediterranean problem. During her regency Anne of Beaujeu (1483-91), forced to stifle the new revolts of the high feudal nobility, still had the possibility of securing for the Crown the Duchy of Brittany through the marriage of the young king to the heiress of the duchy. It would be the young and romantic Charles VIII (1483-98) who, however, would cross the Alps pursuing the dream of the conquest of Naples (as heir to the rights of the Angevins) as a stage toward Jerusalem and Constantinople. Once the Breton crisis had been settled with the disastrous cessions mentioned above, Charles VIII sent his embassies from Senlis in May 1493 to the Italian states to request their support. In Italy no one believed in the expedition, and the replies were evasive, except at Milan, which by reason of Genoa was almost a vassal: the king's childish obstinacy overcame internal opposition, and by July 1494 fighting had already begun at Rapallo, and Genoa was a French base. In October the French army was in Piedmont and, in the first days of November, in the Sforza territory of Lunigiana, and it easily caused the opposition of Florence to collapse, because the city was traditionally pro-French, even though the inept Piero de' Medici was tied to the Aragonese of Naples. Having extorted money from Florence, the march proceeded easily as far as Rome: on 22 February the king was in Naples without ever having fought a real battle. The Italian states now felt the error of having revealed their own political and military weakness and, urged on by Venice and by the Aragonese, who — as over Sicily — with a French Naples formed an Italian and European league; the king had to return to France with the intention, which lasted until his death, of returning to Italy. Unfortunately the French monarchy thus committed itself to this line which, harmful to its true interests, coalesced all Europe against it, and it was to persist in it until 1559, because the successor, Louis XII (1498-1515), as grandson of Valentina Visconti, immediately organized the conquest of Milan with the help of Venice and of Alexander VI. Milan was soon occupied, and France thereby possessed the key to Italy, but Louis XII continued Charles VIII's error and aspired to Naples. The southern Kingdom was soon occupied and partitioned with Aragon, but it was also lost as soon as the first rivalries arose, and Louis XII thus convinced Spain that Naples could not remain Spanish with a French Milan. Louis XII's Italian policy continued against Venice with the League of Cambrai, but Venice's recovery was to lead to that anti-French coalition which was in the logic of Europe, to the expulsion of the French from Milan (1512) and to the invasion of France by the English and the imperial forces: in 1515 Louis XII, dying, would see all his conquests lost. His cousin and successor Francis I of Valois-Angoulême (1515-47) with the victory of Melegnano (1515) retook Milan, but only for 6 years, because once war with Spain was reopened, now the instrument of Charles V's imperial ambitions, France was to lose it, and forever. New expeditions failed, and the gravest defeat was that of Pavia (1525), for which Francis I, taken prisoner, in order to regain his freedom renounced Italy and Burgundy. Then, to save this province, he made use of the League of Cognac (1526) with the Italian states as a scarecrow, ending by abandoning his allies in the Peace of Cambrai (1529).

Italy was already lost even though in 1536 Francis I occupied Piedmont on the pretext of the inheritance of his mother Louise of Savoy; the struggle against Charles V's universal ambitions shifted from Italy toward Flanders because of the resolute neutrality of Venice and of Paul III despite French intrigues, and France, in seeking balancing allies, had to resort to the Ottomans, to their corsair fleets of the Mediterranean and to the German reformed princes who checked Charles V's imperial power. Thanks to a balance of forces, France was not touched by the Emperor's invasions, but the last attempts of Francis I and his son Henry II (1547-59) had no result; and at Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559 the pacts of 30 years earlier at Cambrai were confirmed, the Italian lands occupied in Corsica, Tuscany and Piedmont were definitively relinquished; the only improvement was the recovery of Calais and the occupation of Metz, Toul, Verdun and of the Saluzzo.

To the ruinous wars was added bad administration. Louis XII had sought to lighten taxes and remove injustices, earning the title of father of the people; but with Francis I, to the needs of war were added those of a brilliant and sumptuous court that traveled continually with its train of more than ten thousand horses. The budget, despite the size of the taille, struggled to be in balance in ordinary years, and because war was almost constant, recourse was had to loans, especially with the Italian merchants of Lyon, and to the disastrous sale of offices multiplied for this purpose and then also made transferable; which, if it provided capital at the moment, deprived the State forever of the corresponding revenue. The tax burden, the devaluation of money which reduced the value of annuities and wages, disturbed economic life; thus toward the end of the period there was discontent over economic hardship and over the growing administrative centralization which, not always useful, in any case disturbed habits and interests.

The Italian war and the peace of '59 were followed in France by forty years of agitation and civil wars which are customarily called religious, that is, struggles between the reformed (Huguenots) and Catholics, but in fact these wars had far more complex origins, such as the discredit of the defeated monarchy, the weakness of the government of three minor or nearly minor kings (Francis II [1559-60], Charles IX [1560-74], Henry III [1574-89], the three sons of Henry II). Such weakness allowed the feudal nobility to attempt a revenge against the monarchy by using the religious pretext, while the latter pursued a policy of tolerance and balance between the two factions. The French monarchy lacked that interest in the Reformation which the German princes had in seizing the great ecclesiastical properties, since the king could dispose of them in another way, and there were no true ecclesiastical princes in France. Already Francis I, even in league with the German Protestants, if at first he maintained an uncertain attitude, later revealed himself severe and suspicious toward the reformed, many of whom had to go into exile, among them John Calvin.

The reformed party, at first widespread among the discontented lower classes, changed face when in '58-59 the Bourbons and the Condé adhered to it, the last branch of the royal family besides the reigning one, which had benefited from the marriage of Antoine de Bourbon (brother of Louis de Condé) with Jeanne d'Albret, heiress of French Navarre. From that adherence the party took on a political character, as a resumption of the feudal struggle against the monarchy, demanding besides freedom of the new worship the recognition of the rights of the princes of the blood, especially out of hatred for the dukes of Guise, of Lorraine origin, who through the valor of Marshal Francis prevailed in the government and was the head of the Catholic party. During the minority of Charles IX the regent Catherine de' Medici (who ended up being hated by both parties and who was reproached for her Italian origin) in the Estates General of 1561 published an Ordinance of conciliation. But in '62 a grave incident provoked by Guise at Vassy caused the civil war to break out. The peaces of Amboise ('63) and Longjumeau ('68) were nothing but truces. After that of Saint-Germain ('70) the Calvinist leader Coligny sought to win over Charles IX by holding out to him offering him the conquest of Flanders, which had rebelled against Philip II. This brief episode of the Huguenots with the monarchy was tragically interrupted by the massacre of the night of St. Bartholomew (24 Aug. 1572), in which in Paris, with the king's consent, numerous Huguenots were killed under the accusation of plotting against the king. Then came a new civil war and an anti-monarchical stance on the part of Calvinism, and the vain peace of 1576, because the great French majority and the Estates General were against the edicts of toleration. The civil war then worsened when, upon the death in 1584 of the king's brother, who was in turn without children, the succession fell to Henry of Navarre, a Huguenot. The Catholic League, headed by Henry of Guise, accepted the declaration of Pope Sixtus V that Navarre could not, as a heretic, succeed to the throne; in Paris it adopted a hostile attitude toward the king himself, who had Guise killed in his chambers at Blois on 23 Dec. 1588, but who in turn on 1 Aug. 1589 was assassinated beneath Paris, which he had gone to besiege with Henry of Navarre.

Although designated by the dying king, Henry IV (1589-1610) was only partially recognized: Paris invoked the aid of Philip II and received a Spanish garrison. These were four years of confused war, but the national sentiment slowly prevailed: Henry IV, already convinced of the necessity of conversion, abjured in 1593 and was consecrated king the following year in Paris; the war now turned against Spain, which in the Peace of Vervins (1598) reconfirmed the frontiers of 1599; shortly before, the king, by the Edict of Nantes (30 Apr. 1598), had granted the Protestants freedom of conscience and partial freedom of worship, and in addition, as a guarantee, possession of certain security towns including La Rochelle, a political concession that Richelieu would limit as dangerous. Henry IV set about with a firm hand restoring the decadent royal authority, remedying the damages of the civil war, improving the finances, reducing the taille, and encouraging industries and colonization in America; renouncing Saluzzo, he obtained Bresse and Bugey from Charles Emmanuel of Savoy (1601). Once the major wounds were healed, France now returned to the old dream of European primacy; the resistance in Germany of the Protestants to the Catholic advance offered an occasion for revenge against the Habsburgs. But the rumor of agreements with the Protestants disturbed the Catholics, and the king fell victim to a fanatic (14 May 1610), leaving as heir a nine-year-old child (Louis XIII [1610-43]) under the regency of Queen Marie de' Medici.

With the disappearance of so great a personality came a policy of weakness toward the nobility and the Huguenots, who had become overbearing again, of squandering the treasury to calm the discontented, of convoking the Estates General (the ill-omened birds of the monarchy), and of the predominance in government of the queen's Florentine favorites, foremost among them Concini, the husband of one of her ladies-in-waiting. The young king freed himself of him in 1617 by having him assassinated and by removing his mother, only to fall into the hands of incompetents and dishonest men. Abroad, a close union with Spain was brought about, even arranging the king's marriage to the daughter of Philip III, and France looked on inertly at the first phase of the Thirty Years' War and at the imperial triumphs. Only with the advent of Richelieu in 1624 did France have a government and a policy of her own, which Louis XIII, though weak, had the merit of supporting against the whole court. Richelieu resumed Henry IV's methods, subduing the feudal nobility, the Huguenots, and the Parlements, and ruthlessly crushing the intrigues of the queen mother and of the king's brother. In foreign policy he gradually resumed the struggle against the House of Austria, first driving it out of the Valtellina, then bringing a French prince (Gonzaga-Nevers) to Mantua and Casale, and having Pinerolo ceded to him by Savoy in order to have a foothold in Italy. Then, although he was a zealous bishop of Luçon and an effective polemicist against the Protestants, he did not hesitate to make use of them on the political plane, to counter imperial absolutism, first aiding the Swedes and then intervening directly in Germany and in Flanders. His policy was then carried to a successful conclusion by Cardinal Mazarin, who succeeded him after his death in 1642 and that of the king in 1643, during the regency of Anne of Austria. With the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the Empire ceded Alsace to France, except for Strasbourg, and recognized the semi-independence of the German princes. Once the German war was happily ended, Mazarin still had to win the war with Spain and to overcome the opposition of the Parlement of Paris to the new taxes, which had degenerated into a true revolt of the population, and then, once this was quelled, the opposition of the princes when he had Condé arrested, who claimed to be the arbiter of the government (the parliamentary and princely Fronde). Mazarin had to go into exile (1651-53) and returned only when the discord among his enemies and the tenacious confidence of the queen mother allowed him to. He then sought to repair the grave losses caused by the Fronde and succeeded, with the alliance of Cromwell's England, in forcing Spain to the Peace of the Pyrenees (7 Nov. 1659), which gave France Cerdanya and Roussillon, a large part of Artois, and cities of Flanders, while by the marriage of Louis XIV to the Spanish Infanta, Maria Theresa, he placed, as it were, a mortgage on the Spanish inheritance. Two years later he died (1661), leaving France in first place in a Europe half destroyed by wars.

With Louis XIV (1643-1715) came the great century, the golden age of France: not only did the power of Louis XIV dominate Europe, but the court of Versailles with its splendor was the model of European courts, French fashions imposed themselves everywhere, and literature and culture were celebrated to the point of irritating every learned circle in Europe. The reign of Louis XIV (a man of high intellect and marvelous activity), begun with great triumphs, ended disastrously because of the continuous wars that raised ever wider coalitions against him. In the first war against Spain he obtained cities of Flanders, including Lille; in the second against Holland he obtained Franche-Comté in the Peace of Nijmegen (1678); and then, during peacetime, with the Chambers of Reunion he occupied new cities including Strasbourg (1682); these and other acts of high-handedness, including the bombardment of Genoa (1685), brought about the League of Augsburg (1688-97), which forced Louis XIV to give back a large part of what he had occupied. In the last war, the War of the Spanish Succession (c. 1700-13), for having accepted the Spanish throne in favor of his grandson Philip V, he found almost all of Europe against him and was forced to sue for peace, accepting the dismemberment of the Spanish dominion to the advantage of Austria (Utrecht, 1713). In 1715 the king died, leaving as heir a five-year-old great-grandson under the Regency (1715-1723) of the Duke of Orléans. Internally, as regards economic life, despite the work of the great minister J. B. Colbert at the beginning, France was in ruinous conditions. Royal despotism had suppressed every autonomy and freedom. In religious matters, not only had the Edict of Nantes (18 Oct. 1685), which regulated relations with the Reformed, been revoked, but it had been sought to impose their conversion by military means, provoking the exodus of thousands of Frenchmen. Relations with the Holy See were repeatedly put to the test by the high-handedness of Louis XIV, particularly in 1662 under Alexander VII in connection with the episode of the Corsican guard in Rome, and then in 1687 in connection with the so-called privileges of the embassies, which the king did not intend to renounce, despite the abuses to which they had given rise and the renunciation of the other powers. But far more serious were two theological controversies that kept minds agitated. The first was that of the famous Gallican liberties, which claimed to limit the pontifical authority and, as a consequence, its infallibility, and which, having reopened as early as 1661, culminated in March 1682 with the proclamation by the Assembly of the French clergy of the four articles, promptly sanctioned by the King. The second controversy, which must be kept distinct from the preceding one, was that of Jansenism (v. GIANSENIO and GIANSENISMO), which in its various phases and condemnations, availing itself of the four articles, contributed to disrupting ecclesiastical discipline and the due dependence on the Holy See. Nor should the struggle against quietism be forgotten (v.).

The seventy years that run from the death of the "great king" to the Revolution are nothing but a continuous movement toward the final crisis.

The ever more serious decline of the monarchy with its unfortunate wars, the scandalous life of Louis XV (1715-74) and the morals of the court, the disastrous financial policy while the conviction of a necessary renewal of the political and social constitution grew stronger in public opinion, lead France toward a catastrophic collapse. Yet France is still the center of Europe for art, literature, philosophy, fashions: its action is immense in every field despite the decline of its political prestige. The war of the Polish succession, to place Stanisław Leszczyński, the queen's father, on the throne, fails in its purpose but gives France hope of Lorraine (Nancy), temporarily given to Stanisław, while in Italy it forced Austria to leave Naples and Sicily: the second, for the Austrian succession, full of disasters, served only, as was said at the time, for the king of Prussia, who gained Silesia. In the third war, called the Seven Years' War, there was the reversal of alliances attributed by public opinion to Pompadour: it cost France Canada, Senegal and Louisiana. Shortly afterward, to counterbalance English predominance in the Mediterranean, Corsica was occupied (1768). Public opinion became ever more hostile because of the scandals of the king's private life, the squandering to which it gave rise, the weakness of foreign policy in which, entangled by the intrigues of Austria, he allowed the first partition of Poland to be carried out. In literature, criticism of the old constitution and of the remnants of feudal privileges grew sharper, while the third estate aspired to a participation in government proportionate to its economic importance.

Many hopes were placed in the nephew Louis XVI (1774-92), but his good and honest nature was matched neither by intellect nor by will, while the task of reforming so disordered a State was such as to make a Henry IV tremble; the king's defects were aggravated by the queen Marie Antoinette of Austria, certainly not guilty as the slanderous libels presented her, but frivolous, fond of luxury and inclined to meddle in politics to favor her friends or the interests of her House. Among the new ministers, Turgot was honest and capable and of high economic competence but without the energy to fight against the intrigues of the court, which was suspicious of his intentions of economy. The war for American Independence was a success (heavy for French finances, already so shaken) in that it humiliated England, which lost Minorca and restored Senegal, but it spread even more among the population those principles of liberty that were seen defended in America and not applied at home. In public life the financial disaster loomed, especially after Necker's report in 1781 had revealed the gravity of the court's expenses: from Necker to Calonne, to Loménie de Brienne the squandering never ceases, so public opinion, the assemblies of notables and the Parliaments refuse new taxes and instead demand a national assembly. The monarchy, discredited, reduced to bankruptcy, having suspended payments, resorts to convening the Estates General, forgotten for 175 years, and to recalling Necker to calm public opinion; thus it is believed that the reform of the State is being begun, and instead the door is opened to the Revolution.

Luigi Simeoni

III. THE REVOLUTION

The financial situation, the discredit cast upon those who did not know how to remedy it, and political-military failures would not have sufficed to create that complex of events which, from the last decade of the 18th century, reverberated from France throughout all Europe, giving beginning to the new history. Convictions and tendencies had evolved in the public spirit that aimed at a radical transformation of society both in the spiritual field and in the political-economic one. Among the educated classes that spirit had taken root which in France is known under the name of "Encyclopedism," because its particular exponent was the famous Encyclopédie (which, under the profession of philosophy, called minds to full independence from every revelation and to the total experience of human reason. All this was expressed with the enunciation of freedom of conscience, which polarized either toward a deism that, while not disowning all spirituality, conceived it as independent of every confessional allegiance and of every providential intervention, or toward a materialism, elegant, if you will, and refined, but still always brutal in its consequences; Christianity was combated, more or less covertly, in the historical and philosophical field, or it was tolerated out of the necessity of moderating popular instincts.

A wholly practical aspect philosophism assumed by virtue of the doctrines and pedagogy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which had wide diffusion and favor. From him originated what was called the return to the state of nature, that is, to that original natural goodness which would later have been disfigured by absolutism, to the primitive equality and brotherhood that were to destroy the regime of privilege, created by the egoism of the usurping classes. Public education was therefore to be radically reformed, a constant recourse to popular consultation was to be created, both in proposing laws and in appointing those who execute them; a rotation in power together with state education was to offer a guarantee against any return of tyranny. It was now believed that the principles and directives for creating a new society were in hand, according to the conclusions of philosophy; and in particular the third estate, in comparison with the nobility and the clergy, considered the holders of privilege, intended to make prevail the force of its numbers and of its claims.

The clergy found itself in a very delicate situation. In its highest ranks it was recruited from the highest nobility, and the richest benefices, bishoprics, abbeys, pensions, allowed it a life of splendor that bordered on worldliness; the lesser benefices, especially in the collegiate and cathedral Chapters, were in fact reserved to the middle nobility of town and country. Finally the rural clergy, the most numerous, had a very small part in the distribution of ecclesiastical revenues; constrained to a very modest life, with the obligation of providing also for the popular school, it was in direct contact with the humblest part of the population from which it itself came, felt more closely the weight of social injustices and the legitimate right that a remedy be applied to them. It therefore found easy consent among it not only for what seemed bound to raise the conditions of the people, but also for those proposals of ecclesiastical reorganization that would make at least the most glaring abuses disappear. No wonder, therefore, that it sided with the work of the third estate.

The conditions of the public spirit, when on May 5, 1780 the Estates General opened, were divided between those who would have wished to preserve as much as possible of the "ancien régime," and these were relatively few, because a renewal was felt to be needed, and those who wanted to set their hand to a general reform as broad as possible in harmony with the new theories. To what point it should go, by what paths and with what means, everything was conceived in a generic way without any program. The program was developed little by little by the mob of Paris under the shouts of its demagogues, and Paris was the tyrant of all France; while the court and the ruling class showed themselves incapable of any initiative. The representatives of the third estate, who in the total number of about 1200 constituted half, claimed for themselves the right of control over the elections, calling upon the representatives of the other two estates to join with them and showing clearly the intention of acting as a National Assembly with the aim of modifying the traditional constitution of the State. And since 207 ecclesiastics also sat among them, there took part with these also others who sat among the representatives of the clergy; there soon joined them some of the representatives of the nobility more inclined to reforms, so that the third estate could by now consider itself the representative no longer of one class, but of the whole nation. The presence in Paris of so many deputies and their progressive sitting before the clamors of the city crowd, intoxicated by the speeches of the ringleaders who spoke of the abolition of tyranny, led to the taking and demolition of the Bastille, the fortress that dominated the city (July 14). Two days later the deputies proclaimed themselves a Constituent Assembly; and as the foundation of the new constitution to be given to the nation, there were published (Aug. 24), in 17 articles, the Rights of Man (v.) and of the Citizen, with which there was proclaimed without further ado the sovereignty of the people, the freedom of religious beliefs and of the press, the right of resistance against oppression, that is, the right to revolution. Law is there called an expression of the universal will, and before it all men were equal. But since this was not enough to restore order and concord, on the night of Aug. 4 the nobility renounced its privileges of rank, the landed rights most burdensome for the people (hunting and fishing, feudal dues, reserved dovecotes), exemption from taxes and its own tribunal. For its part the clergy renounced the tithes, contenting itself with a compensation, the stole fees, exemption from taxes; and to the contribution of 30 million, already undertaken to heal the financial deficit, it added that of 400 million, that is, of the third part of its real property; although in the past it had contributed more than the other two estates to the good of the nation. In this way the particular constitutions of estates and corporations and the inequalities in criminal law ceased; access to all civil offices was opened to all citizens.

The decision was more generous than enlightened and did not suffice to satisfy the spirit that was forming in the public. On Oct. 10, on the proposal of Maurice de Talleyrand, bishop of Autun, the Assembly declared that ecclesiastical goods were national goods; and on Nov. 2 it established the contributions that the nation was to pay for the maintenance of ecclesiastics; thus, with the old jarring disparities removed, they were reduced to salaried employees; it further established that the alienation of the goods should begin at once. In Feb. 1790 the Assembly denied value to solemn vows and permitted religious to return to their own houses with the reservation of a pension on the goods of the convents; in Sept. all were ordered to lay aside the religious habit. Almost all the nuns, however, remained faithful to their vows; so too did the religious enrolled in the more observant Orders; while among the others many were the apostates.

The revolutionaries did not want to recognize the Catholic religion as the religion of the State; instead they claimed to draft a Civil Constitution of the Clergy, and Jansenist-minded lawyers put together a plan which, brought before the Assembly, was approved on 27 Nov. 1790 despite the opposition of Catholics, and at the beginning of 1791 its application began. France had been divided into departments and cantons, overriding all historical traditions without regard. This program of absolute equalization was meant to be applied also to ecclesiastical relations, and all those institutions that did not fit into the pre-established frameworks were sacrificed outright. Abbeys, chapters, priories, chapels were done away with. The parishes, dioceses and ecclesiastical metropolises remained: but the 18 archbishoprics and 108 bishoprics were replaced by 10 archbishoprics and 73 bishoprics corresponding to the 83 departments; the parishes were to be constituted by agreement between the bishop and the civil authority on the same principle; the bishops were to be assisted by a council composed of parish priests and vicars. Bishops and parish priests were to be elected by those same electoral assemblies which in the individual departments elected the officers of the State; the metropolitan had the right to confirm bishops, while to the pope was given only a share in the election once it had taken place, for the purpose of preserving unity; the parish priests had to ask their bishops for confirmation of their election; both the one and the other had to swear before the departmental authority to perform their duties and to observe the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. On 2 Jan. 1791 they began by demanding this oath from the members of the Assembly, then from the others who had been obliged to take it. Thinking that this Constitution did not touch dogma, many thought it was not contrary to the spirit of the ancient Church; however, only four bishops swore; it is estimated that a third of the priests took the oath; these were called assermentés (jurors); many of them later withdrew their oath, while the rest lost all credit with the faithful; insermentés were those who refused to swear. Pius VI on 13 Apr. 1791 condemned the Constitution, suspended the assermentés from divine offices and declared the new ecclesiastical elections and promotions null. In reprisal, Avignon and the Venaisin were occupied.

The Constituent Assembly was followed in Oct. 1791 by the Legislative Assembly, which sharpened ever more the struggle against the Church: on 29 Nov. the oath was imposed on all ecclesiastics under penalty of being unable to exercise the ecclesiastical ministry and of losing their pension. In the spring of 1792 it was forbidden to wear ecclesiastical dress and what remained of the religious Congregations was suppressed; priests who had not taken the oath were exiled and deported, so that those who managed to remain were forced to exercise the sacred ministry secretly at the peril of their lives. Special laws introduced civil marriage and divorce.

While legislation was being enacted, the most heated elements not only forced the Assembly's hand, but kept disorder alive in the city and the countryside under the pretext of the struggle against aristocrats and traitors to the people. They were led by Danton, who dominated through the club of the Cordeliers, by Robespierre, head of the club of the Mountain, and by the ferocious Marat, and they provoked the massacres of 2-6 Sept. in Paris, accompanied by the most serious repercussions in the provinces, where the most unscrupulous revolutionaries were sent on mission. On 21 Sept. the new National Convention proclaimed the Republic and on 21 Jan. 1793 had Louis XVI beheaded; the queen Marie Antoinette was also sent to her death; a Committee of Public Safety was instituted with the aim of repressing every internal revolt and of providing for checking the foreign invasion; thus there came about the creation of a new army of a popular character, organized with those elements of the royal army that accepted the new service. Meanwhile matters reached the point of officially declaring every form of religion suppressed, thereby also striking the jurors, who were ordered to contract marriage; the new republican calendar of 12 months and three décades per month was introduced, beginning with 21 Sept. 1793; and on 10 Nov., in place of Christianity, the cult of reason and of nature was introduced, which two squads, enthroned in the cathedral of Notre Dame, were charged with representing.

With the killing of Marat (13 July 1793), discord penetrated even among the men of terror. Robespierre, who soon found distasteful the ridiculous buffooneries staged by Danton and Hébert, pure materialists, sent them to the guillotine (Apr. 1794). In the pose of a dictator he wanted the Convention to recognize the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul; and with a solemn ceremony he had discord, atheism and egoism symbolically struck down to be replaced by knowledge, justice and love (7 May). But on 28 July the Thermidorians sent him to the guillotine and seized power. It seemed that there was no respite for Christianity, because the Convention on 27 Aug. decreed that the churches still used for worship should pass into the possession of the nation; nevertheless, by the decrees of 21 Feb. and 30 May 1795, the reopening of the churches was granted, and the constitutional bishops and priests took advantage of it to organize themselves, under the guidance of Grégoire, sworn bishop of Blois; while Catholics were divided over the oath demanded by the Convention, in which hatred against royal authority and anarchy was professed.

On 20 Aug. 1795 France gave itself a new constitution with two chambers and a committee of five directors (Directory), to which executive power belonged. Religious relations did not improve; while the sects, among them that of the theophilanthropists, could organize freely, many priests were guillotined, many others who had returned from exile were deported to Guiana or interned on the French islands of Ré and Oléron (1797).

The laws of the Revolution were immediately applied also in the countries that the revolutionary armies managed to occupy. In Holland, as early as 1792, the Batavian Republic was constituted and the Reformed Church lost its privileged position there, so that oppressed Catholics derived some advantage from it. After the revolutionary victories of Jemappes (1792) and Fleurus (1794), Belgium, taken from Austria, was annexed to France, and there the refugee French priests were persecuted, the republican calendar was introduced, the churches were taken away and adapted to civil and military uses, public worship and processions were forbidden, tithes were abolished and communication with the Holy See was prevented. The republican oath was imposed on ecclesiastics; and because for the most part they did not submit, recourse was had against them too to condemnations and deportation.

Beginning in 1792, the territories that the Church possessed along the left bank of the Rhine fell one by one into the power of the Republic: the electoral principalities of Cologne, Trier and Mainz, the prince-bishoprics of Speyer and Worms, and moreover the possessions held there by the Kingdom of Prussia and other minor principalities. In 1793 Prussia concluded a separate peace, and France organized in all those territories four new departments without introducing there the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the new calendar, though suppressing a great part of the monasteries and obliging the clergy to take the civic oath. In these countries too an ecclesiastical and political order that had lasted for centuries was relentlessly swept away.

In Italy the Revolution was introduced by the army commanded by Bonaparte in 1796, which soon got the better of the Kingdom of Piedmont, occupied the Duchy of Milan, the Po duchies, the territories of the Venetian Republic, as far as beyond the Isonzo. The Pope was forced into the Peace of Tolentino (17 Feb. 1797), losing the Legations and contributing a heavy war indemnity in money and works of art; until, following the riots artfully stirred up in Rome itself, General Berthier inaugurated the Roman Republic (17 Feb. 1798) and drove the Pope from Rome. At the will of the Directory, Pius VI was the following year taken as a prisoner to F., where he died on 29 Aug. 1799. In the meantime Napoleon was engaged in the Egyptian campaign and F. was driven out of Italy by an Austro-Russian coalition; in Venice the new pope Pius VII was elected (14 March 1800), who returned on 3 July to Rome, by then freed from the recent republican regime.

Meanwhile Napoleon returned from Egypt and with a coup d'état abolished the Directory (10 Nov. = 19 Brumaire 1799); it was replaced by a government of three consuls, of whom he, as first, assumed full civil and military powers. To settle the fate of F. he undertook a new campaign in Italy and with the victory of Marengo (14 June 1800) drove out the Austrians; at the same time F. returned to the Rhine. If internal peace was to be restored in F., it was necessary to regulate the religious relations upset by republican intolerance, and Napoleon thought of a Concordat with the Pope to replace that of 1516. The negotiations concluded in Paris on 15 July 1801; it was recognized that the Catholic religion was that of the majority of the French and therefore the free and public exercise of worship was admitted. In place of the ancient dioceses, 60 episcopal sees were established, of which 10 were metropolitan; the individual bishops were recognized as having the right to establish a Chapter and a seminary and to create parishes; the Church renounced the ancient properties, while the government in compensation bound itself to pay an allowance to the bishops and parish priests; the appointment of bishops was reserved to the first consul, canonical institution to the pope. F. thus maintained the privileges of the old Concordat; nevertheless the opposition was tenacious, and the promulgation came only on 18 Apr. 1802, accompanied by 77 "organic articles" for the application of the Concordat itself. These were inspired by the old regalist traditions, imposed the placet of the government on the acts of the pope and of foreign councils, forbade the holding of synods and ecclesiastical assemblies without the consent of the government, admitted the appeal "ab abusu" from the decisions of the Church to the public authorities, obliged acceptance of the four Gallican articles of 1682, and introduced a distinction between parish priests appointed for life (curés) and those removable (desservants). Despite the protests of the Pope, the articles were promptly applied. Of lesser importance, because the disturbances had been far smaller, was the Concordat with the Cisalpine Republic, which Napoleon ratified on 2 Nov. 1803 and which was published in Milan on 26 Jan. 1804, with an addition of articles analogous to the French ones.

By now victorious over the European coalitions against F., on 18 May 1804 Napoleon was proclaimed Emperor of the French by the Senate, and Pius VII consented to go to Paris to crown him (2 Dec.); on this occasion Francis II gave up the title of Emperor of Germany for that of Emperor of Austria, and Napoleon also assumed that of King of Italy (26 May 1805). But he could not contain his ambition, provoking new European coalitions against himself. He would have liked the Pope to move to Paris, which was to become the brain of the civilized world; he occupied the pontifical territories one after another, and because Pius VII launched excommunication against the violators of the rights of the Church, he had Rome occupied, Pius VII dragged as a prisoner to Savona (15 Aug. 1809), a National Council of French and Italian bishops assembled in Paris (June 1811), then Pius VII taken to Fontainebleau (June 1812), to wrest from him a new Concordat (25 Jan. 1813); and for a moment by violence he succeeded. After the unhappy Russian campaign, Napoleon was unable to resist Europe united against him, F. was invaded, and he fell into the hands of his enemies (1815). With the Treaty of Vienna concluded on 9 June 1815, the allies thought they had restored order in Europe. Louis XVIII ascended the throne of his unhappy brother, and thus came the period of the Restoration.

IV. CONTEMPORARY FRANCE

With the Restoration it was thought possible to suffocate the revolutionary spirit entirely and to establish a type of government not too dissimilar from the ancien régime; but the years of the Revolution had not passed in vain over Europe and in particular over France. An entire new legislation had been introduced along with a new economic and social order; with the great roads new communications had opened; with the abolition of the ancient noble privileges and of corporative protectionism, the new banking capitalism was being created with the introduction of large-scale industry and the rise of the proletariat, the origin of new social movements, timid at first but then increasingly threatening. Propaganda through the press and the spoken word could no longer be halted by police measures, and the parties did not intend to abdicate their principles. Alongside the royalists, constant, especially with regard to the Church, in the old ideas, stood the Bonapartists, the republicans, the remnants of the old revolutionaries, and they agitated for liberty, whence the label of "liberals" willingly accepted by the opposition parties.

A concordat that Louis XVIII wished to substitute for the Napoleonic one (1817) could not even be presented for a vote in the Chambers, and only in 1822 was a new ecclesiastical circumscription reached. Nevertheless the life of the Church went on flourishing anew: the number of priests, seminaries and educational institutions grew; the religious Orders and the female monasteries were gradually rebuilt; new teaching and hospitaller Congregations were organized; the missions among the infidels found new missionaries and new aid; even ecclesiastical properties and pious foundations were able to rise again. A strong anticlerical reaction was noted in Aug. 1830 when Charles X, brother of Louis XVIII, was forced to leave the throne to Louis Philippe of Orléans, the "bourgeois king." In 1848 the revolution dethroned him as well and new elections were called; a new republican constitution was then promulgated and Charles Louis Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon I, became its president; however, in 1852, with a new coup d'état, he had himself proclaimed emperor under the name of Napoleon III. The "Liberal Empire," as it was called, initially seconded the activity that the Church carried on more freely thanks to the popularity it had acquired. Profiting from liberty, it gathered synods and provincial councils, gave broader development to its institutions and its schools, removing almost entirely the encumbrances of the old royalism, the particularisms and the more advanced Gallican conceptions. But although it showed itself zealous, for political interests, in defending the temporal power of the Pope, the Empire resumed the oppressive measures of the first Empire and manifested its ill will especially on the occasion of the Vatican Council. The Franco-Prussian war of 1870 had its epilogue with the fall of Napoleon III, the invasion of France and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine. Having overcome the disorders provoked by the Paris Commune (v.) in May 1871, the Assembly, which had been elected to restore order in France, continued to govern the country. Its members were in the majority of monarchical tendencies, but divided among themselves and lacking a clear-sighted and resolute leader; it was therefore possible for the anticlerical and republican minority, guided above all by Léon Gambetta and Jules Grévy with the influence of Freemasonry, to obtain a majority in the elections of 1877 and to conduct an anticlerical policy. Without even touching the legislation that ensured the freedom of the school, a recent conquest of the Catholics, a way was found to close the institutes held by the Jesuits and to drive these from France; to forbid priests and religious to teach in the public schools and to remove religious instruction from these (1866); divorce was introduced (1882), and clerics and religious were obliged to military service. Leo XIII repeatedly exhorted French Catholics to remain united by accepting the republican Constitution for the supreme good of the Church and the State and by condemning the concept of the separation of the two powers. A violent anticlerical struggle flared up again in 1899 on the occasion of the Dreyfus affair (v.), until in 1901, through the work of the Waldeck-Rousseau ministry, there came the proscription of the religious Congregations, though without succeeding in suffocating free teaching. Through the work of the minister Combes, on Good Friday of 1904 the encolpites were removed from the schools and the tribunals; and in that same year there came the rupture of diplomatic relations with the Holy See. The last step was taken with the law of 9 Dec. 1905, which, while declaring that "the Republic assured freedom of conscience," added that it "recognized and salaried no cult" and therefore "suppressed in the budget of the State, the departments and the communes all expenses relating to the exercise of cults." By 1906, Association cultuelles could be constituted among the citizens to "provide for the expenses, the maintenance and the public exercise of a cult," with the faculty of collecting dues in money, constituting limited reserve funds, receiving in trust the buildings of worship with their furnishings and the dwelling buildings of the clergy. They could unite among themselves, constituting a central administration and direction, and dissolve at their pleasure; they were the only ones responsible as regarded the cult and had juridical personality; the clergy, however, was kept completely apart from them. With special articles the law regulated the exercise of the cult.

With this the Concordat of 1801 was suppressed; Pius X on 11 Feb. 1906 pointed out the wrong that was being done to the Church, disapproved the law as contrary to its hierarchical constitution, and the Cultuelles were therefore not constituted. Nevertheless religious life was not interrupted thanks to the courage and generosity of the clergy and the French people, so much so that the government in 1907 had to leave the churches to the use of the faithful and apply the earlier laws concerning the rights of citizens to assemble and to practice the cult that pleased them.

The world war of 1914-18 surprised religious France under the dominion of these "lay laws." After the victory they were not extended to Alsace-Lorraine, reunited with the Republic; diplomatic relations with the Holy See were resumed and a modus vivendi was thought of, which was found in giving the lay laws a broader interpretation, validated by a special opinion of jurists solicited by the government. Thus in each diocese an "Association diocésaine" was constituted under the presidency of the bishop and of an administrative council operating "in conformity with the canonical laws" (cf. the schema in A. Ottaviani, Institutiones iuris publici ecclesiastici, II, Rome 1925, p. 411 ff.); from its competence is excluded all that relates to spiritual government. The encyclical of 18 Jan. 1924 sanctioned this state of affairs, which passed the test of the great war of 1930-45.

III. LITERATURE.

I. ORIGINS. MIDDLE AGES

The Latin introduced by the Romans, after the conquest of Gaul, was the rustic (or vulgar) language spoken by the soldiers and the common people: subjected to the most varied influences of the native element and to the natural corruption of the time, this already hybrid language gradually lost its original characteristics, so much so that, beginning in the 7th century, it took the name of "Roman," increasingly differentiating and particularizing itself into the dialects that originated from it. The two principal branches of this language remained Walloon Roman or the langue d'oïl, of the provinces north of the Loire, and Provençal Roman or the langue d'oc, of the southern ones. Alongside these two idioms, kept vital by a historical antagonism that lasted three centuries, other minor dialects (the bourguignon, the picard, the normand, the français) dominated in the north, until, after the triumph of the Capetian dynasty, French, or the idiom of the Île-de-France, was able to prevail and to compete in literature with the southern dialects (the languedocien, the gasson, the limousin, the provençal), giving rise to the national language of F.

Leaving aside the first public acts written in the primitive langue d'oïl (such as the Treaties of Strasbourg of 842, concluded between Charles the Bald and his brother Louis the German against Lothair), the first literary documents are generally considered to be a Cantilène de Ste Eulalie (881), of which fourteen lines survive, the Vie de St Léger and a Passion du Christ, slightly later; the Vie de St Alexis, which belongs to the same cycle of religious tales, already dates from 1040. To the langue d'oïl is owed, between the end of the 11th century and the 13th - that is, in the most flourishing period of feudalism - the development and affirmation of the highly important French epic and chivalric literature, which was divided into three great cycles of chansons and romans: the French cycle, dedicated to the deeds of Charlemagne and his paladins; the Breton cycle, of an amorous and heroic character, whose protagonists are King Arthur and the knights of the "Round Table"; and finally the classical cycle, also called the cycle of Alexander, which gathers the ancient Greco-Roman and Oriental legends. The poems of the French cycle, called Chansons de geste, are written in verse (decasyllables the oldest and hendecasyllables or alexandrines the more recent), grouped into stanzas and "laises" varying in length and rhyme. Undoubtedly the most beautiful and important of all is the Chanson de Roland (11th century), which narrates the tragic end of Roland at Roncesvalles, a great national epic, where religious enthusiasm, love of country, and chivalric loyalty are expressed with a human truth worthy of the Homeric poems. The authorship of this masterpiece of the French epic, revealed in its authentic text only in 1837 by Francisque Michel, has been attributed to a certain Turold

(or Théroulde), a Norman singer who lived at the end of the 11th century, who was probably no more than the compiler, albeit an inspired one, and certainly not devoid of classical literary influences, of the récit known and sung with many variants already in the middle of that same century in the southwestern regions of France. What is certain, however, is that this and the other chansons de geste were grouped in the 13th century into three principal groups: those of King Charlemagne, of his peers and his vassals; those of Garin de Montglane and his descendants; and finally those of Doon de Mayence; and divided in this manner they have been handed down.

Romance matter and an adventurous and erotic spirit are instead mingled in the romances of the Breton cycle, among which should be remembered the legend of Tristan and Iseult, one of the most beautiful love epics ever conceived (G. Paris), and from which Wagner's well-known musical drama was inspired; and other poems of King Arthur (Lancelot, Ivain, Perceval, etc.) of great poetic and religious suggestiveness. Together with the adventure romances and those, already mentioned, on ancient subjects, this courtoise epic, flourishing in the courts, manifests, for the first time in the Middle Ages, the mystical and erotic aspirations of a society already inclined toward the most exquisite refinements of life and culture, and thus had great influence throughout Western literature.

No less development had, in the langue d'oc, the troubadour poetry, also called the "gay science." The forms employed, from the canso to the sirventes, from the tenso to the pastorela, from the alba to the ballata, destined to welcome, and not only in Provence, the most learned and refined expressions of love, reached in the verses of Guillaume de Poitiers (1073-1126), of Jaufré Rudel, of Bernard de Ventadorn, and especially of Bertrand de Born (d. ca. 1210) an undoubted elegance and musicality, but were subject to the characteristics of the school, and therefore to a certain monotony of themes, well before the Crusade against the Albigensians dispersed the last representatives of the troubadour art.

Having established itself, as has been said, in almost all parts of France as a literary language, after the chansons de geste and the romans courtois, the langue d'oïl came to be employed in every literary genre: in the didactic and satirical poetry of the bestiaries, the fabliaux, the allegorical poems, in dramatic poetry, and in the lyric poetry of songs, odes and ballads; as well as, as will be seen, in the prose of the chroniques and the sermons. Undoubtedly it is due to the gradual emancipation of the bourgeoisie that, alongside, and almost in opposition to, chivalric poetry, there soon appeared the fabliaux (satirical little tales), marked by an often shameless realism, which reflect the daily aspects of the feudal world, and the great allegorical and didactic poems of the 13th and 14th centuries, first among all the Roman de Renart and the Roman de la Rose. Against the mystical idealism of the time are directed the barbs of the anonymous authors of the Roman de Renart, a collection of twenty-six poems, whose characters are animals, and whose heroes are the fox and the wolf: the one, a symbol of the deceit and hypocrisy by then rampant in the world; the other, of the violence that always accompanies fraud. Amorous and didactic matter is instead developed by the very long Roman de la Rose, which is considered the masterpiece of medieval allegorical poetry. It consists of two very different parts, both in the time in which they were composed and in the spirit that animated them. The first (4000 lines), published around 1230, the work of Guillaume de Lorris, presents itself as an ars amatoria, in which all the vicissitudes and adventures of a thwarted love unfold around the essential symbol of the rose. Less rich in imagination and more laden with symbols is the second part, written more than forty years later by Jean de Meung, who transforms the love romance into a kind of encyclopedia and universal satire. The work, which in its time had an enormous success, was used and imitated in a thousand ways, not only by satirical and didactic poets, but also by Dante, by Marot and by Spenser.

The oldest drama known in the French language is the Représentation d'Adam (12th century), followed, in the next century, by the Jeu de St Nicolas of Jean Bodel and the Miracle de Théophile of Rutebeuf; there remain, of the

In the 14th century, moreover, forty-three dramatic representations survive, all belonging to the genre of the Miracles de Notre-Dame: their themes are drawn from the lives of the Virgin and the saints, and, if they are an example of wonderful popular ingenuousness, too often they have little artistic value. More important are undoubtedly the mystères, religious dramas staged by the Confréries de la Passion, in which episodes of the Old and New Testaments, legends of the saints and moments of the Passion are recounted with great dramatic prominence. In the 15th century, to the miracles and mystères are added, articulating the sacred with the profane, moralités, farces, soites, sermons, poems and monologues: we are at the dawn of dramatic poetry and of the modern theater.

Within the middle of the 13th century, at Douai, Rouen, Arras and in other centers, where public poetic contests are proclaimed, bourgeois and popular lyric poetry flourishes, in clear opposition to the courtly and aristocratic kind. The first and most celebrated author of songs was Rutebeuf (d. ca. 1225), a poor Parisian, pious and of ardent heart, of whom numerous verses of a religious, bacchic and satirical character have survived.

A notable dramatic and lyric poet was also Adam de la Halle, who lived at the court of Robert II of Artois and was the author of a famous Congé. Of the other rhymers of the same period, mention should be made of Guillaume de Machaut, Philippe de Vitry, reputed by Petrarch to be the greatest poet of his time, Jean Froissart, Eustache Deschamps, authors of numerous ballades, songs and dits; Christine de Pisan, Italian by birth, who pours out in the Cent ballades d'amont et d'amie her gentle and melancholy soul; Alain Chartier, and, lastly, the learned and refined Charles d'Orléans, who had a most agitated political life, without knowing how to translate it into original lyrical impulse. « It seems that up to the middle of the 14th century there is a kind of contradiction between the poet's art and the intensity of his emotions. Villon will be the first to bridge this antinomy » (P. Van Tieghem).

Between the second half of the 14th century and the first half of the 15th, it is undoubtedly to Villon that the palm of poetry belongs. His agitated and guilty existence (1431-70?), which unfolded first in Paris, where he obtained the licence and the maîtrise ès-arts, and then, after a death sentence for homicide, flights and robberies, at Blois, at the court of Orléans, and finally, as it seems, in Burgundy, was devoted in its better moments to poetry. Among the 2,500 verses he left us, one distinguishes a Petit testament (1456), a Grand testament (1463) and a few isolated lyrics: but this is enough to compose the portrait of a soul condemned to suffer and to make others suffer, and yet, in the face of pure and sincere poetry, tormented and devout.

At the beginning of the 13th century, excellent historical chroniques are already to be found: Geoffroy de Villehardouin (d. 1213) dedicated one to the Fourth Crusade and the capture of Jerusalem, and one does not know whether to admire more the modernity of his thought or the simplicity of his style; while in the Histoire de saint Louis by Jean sire de Joinville (1224-1319), « les saintes paroles et les bons faits » of the great Saint are described with an amiable and penetrating candor. The chroniques multiply in the 14th and 15th centuries, often combining literary quality with historical and documentary value: interest in the Crusades and the East alternates with interest in the great events of the time, as in the immense history of the Hundred Years' War written by Froissart or in the Mémoires de Commines (1445-1509), who was in the service of Louis XI and narrated his wars and political enterprises, giving the first truly modern example of historical and political analysis. Alongside history, political and religious eloquence take a worthy place in the same period; while the former asserts itself after the assembly of the Estates General (1302), the latter interprets admirably, especially in the sermons of the great preachers Bernard and Maurice Sully, this age of transition from the pure religious values of the Middle Ages to the humanistic and scientific inquiries that characterize the Renaissance.

II. THE RENAISSANCE

Preceded, as in Italy, by a fervor of erudite discoveries, oriented toward Greco-Roman antiquity, by philological fanaticism and then, gradually, by a mature scientific awareness, the fruit of the great geographical discoveries and of the invention of printing, the age of the Renaissance assumes in F. more reflected aspects, both in the field of culture and in that of art, where, following the wars in Italy and the influx of Italian artists and men of letters to the court of Charles VIII, of Louis XII and of Francis I, the Italian influence is certainly affirmed. It is for this reason that in the sixteenth century in F. the detachment from medieval culture is felt less, and it persists in the works of the principal writers of the century.

Bound to the spirit of Humanism, but not yet freed from the didactic and allegorical snares of the Middle Ages, are the schools of poetry of the late fifteenth century, in which, alongside masters such as Marot and Scève, mediocre rhymers such as Chastellain, Molinet, Meschinot, etc., are admired. Clément Marot (1496-1544), born at Cahors and formed in the shadow of the school of the grands rhétoriqueurs, became a court poet in the service of Margaret of Navarre, the cultured author of the Heptaméron, and then in that of Francis I, came to Italy following stormy political and religious vicissitudes, and died, still at a young age, at Turin, leaving a great quantity of elegies, epistles, rondeaux and epigrams of delicate workmanship, in which the imitation of Ovid and Martial is already a sign of refined Renaissance elegance. A representative of the école lyonnaise, Maurice Scève (1510-64) sets against it, in the long poem Délie, a different poetic sensibility, the fruit of a philosophical conception of a Platonic and Petrarchan type; which continues, perhaps with greater sincerity, in the brief but intense work of Louise Labé (1525-63). Once the themes and modes of expression of the Middle Ages were exhausted, under the influence of ancient models and of the Italian poets, French lyric poetry gathered, in the second half of the sixteenth century, under the banner of the new school, the Pléiade: arisen from a group of seven poets (Ronsard, Du Bellay, Belleau, Jodelle, Daurat, Baff and Ponthus de Thiard), it set out to transform the national poetic language, defending it from mediocre and courtly poets and raising it, following in the footsteps of the ancients (Homer and Pindar were taken as guides), to sublime heights. To the intentions, expressed theoretically in the Défense et illustration de la langue française by Du Bellay (1549), the poets of the Pléiade, and principally the master Pierre de Ronsard (1524-85), responded with energetic impetus: imitating the ancients, with a copious and rich language, in all literary genres, from tragedy to comedy, from epic to ode. The epic was attempted with the Franciade by Ronsard, but with little success; the theater with Cléopâtre and Didon by Jodelle; more fortunate and inspired, among so many attempts at translation and adaptation, were the cultivators of lyric poetry, Ronsard himself and Du Bellay, who renewed the poetic language, varying the rhythms and vying in nobility of expression with the ancients and with the Italians. The odes, elegies, and eclogues of Ronsard, gathered in Élégies, Mascarades, Bergeries (1565) and in the Recueil de nouvelles poésies (1569), more than the Petrarchan Amours, give a full measure of the grace and lightness of the poet's art; just as to the Olive of Du Bellay is certainly to be preferred the collection of the Regrets et antiquités de Rome, where the author sings, with an almost romantic taste, the poetry of ruins.

An equal formal and thematic renewal occurs in the prose of the sixteenth century. The chivalric romance gives way to the contes and the nouvelles, where the influence of Boccaccio begins to be felt; and it becomes naturalistic with Rabelais; Michel de l'Hôpital and François de Sales excel in eloquence; Montaigne in philosophy and in the essay, followed by thinkers such as Étienne de la Boétie, Pierre Charron and Jean Bodin; the great classical works come to life again under the pen of magnificent translators, such as Amyot; and oratory, with the Satire Ménippée, moves toward the splendor of the following century. François Rabelais (b. near Chinon between 1493 and 1494, d. in 1553), a Benedictine, physician, professor of anatomy, then curate of Meudon, an erudite and curious spirit, full of zeal for science, but arrogant and foul-mouthed, left with the Vie inestimable de Gargantua and with the Faits et dits héroïques du grand Pantagruel (1534) a satirical and pedagogical work, of great human flavor and of very lively writing, which attacks every institution of the time, from the monarchy to the magistracy, from the clergy to the religious Orders and to the schools, uniting «in monstrous fashion a fine and ingenious morality and a filthy corruption» (La Bruyère). A serene and refined thinker is instead Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-92), of whom numerous travels abroad, especially in Italy, should be remembered. The three books of the Essais, published in definitive edition in 1588, reveal, in a methodical and unitary way, his conception of good-natured skepticism; but they are to be taken as an immense mine of partial observations, of attempts, of moralities, where the humanity of the Renaissance expresses itself amply in all its most varied forms. Written in an effective language, endowed with a highly personal style, full of color, of form, of movement, these essays worthily open in French literature the series of the great moral inquiries, escaping a philosophical classification in the strict sense, by reason of the incomparable human and artistic accent with which the most disparate subjects are approached.

With the work of St. François de Sales (1576-1622), who already appears in the seventeenth century, it may be said that the Renaissance expresses its other spiritual and religious face, which will have nothing to fear from the disintegrating work of the «reform», represented in France by G. Calvin. Born near Annecy, and having become bishop of Geneva, the Saint has an artistic personality of the first order, which is affirmed, among other things, in the stupendous Introduction à la vie dévote (1608) and in the Traité de l'amour de Dieu (1616), both of which have remained famous for the breadth of their doctrine, their poetic enthusiasm and their vivid and imaginative style.

III. THE «GOLDEN CENTURY»

In French literature, the seventeenth century is the classical era par excellence. The culture and the administration of the ancients had by then reached such a degree of refinement and equilibrium as to permit the greatest spirits of the time an equal mastery in action and in thought, in erudition and in art: on this plane the values of the spirit acquire a concreteness and a force that render them eminently rational and moral, even when questions of thought and of morality are not at stake. The search for order and clarity dominates in the first half of the century, which runs from the death of Henry IV (1610) to the personal reign of Louis XIV (1661) or, if one wishes to mark two more typical literary moments, from the reform of Malherbe to the appearance of the Provinciales (1590-1656): with this rationalistic exigency are accompanied, without however being annulled, a Christian spirit of moralization and of truth, and a worldly spirit, of dialogue and of exchange of thought. These are the aspects that will make of the work of Descartes, of Pascal and of Corneille a admirable concert, where the deepest and most interior notes of man will be heard.

At the beginning of the 17th century people had grown tired of the overly erudite language and poetry of Ronsard and his disciples: François de Malherbe (1555-1628), born at Caen and having lived until the age of 50 at Aix as secretary to the duke of Angoulême, then at the court of Henry IV and of Marie de' Medici, was the rigorous and pedantic reformer who imposed himself in the art of versifying. Boileau said of him: «Enfin Malherbe vint...», meaning the necessity of his reform, based on clarity of thought, simplicity of form and purity of language. A rational lyric poet and little endowed with imagination, Malherbe left, among so many odes, stanzas, sonnets and epigrams, some authentic masterpieces of poetry, such as the Stances à Du Perier (1601) and the famous Ode sur la mort de Henri IV.

This work of his, of purification and clarification, was continued by the Société polie, by the Hôtel de Rambouillet and finally, with greater scientific rigor, by the Académie Française, founded by Richelieu in 1635. If the Société polie had a worldly and aristocratic character, and the Hôtel de Rambouillet (opened to her friends by Catherine de Vivonne, so that they might gather there to converse) an exquisite character of criticism of letters and of manners, it fell to the Académie to perform the singular task of guiding, through letters, public opinion and of making it converge upon the domain of literature. A truly historic task, then, whose first stage was the compilation of the French Dictionary, published in 1694. Outside the salons and the Académie, the followers of the various schools and religious doctrines stirred on their own account. Among these the most ardent were the Jansenists, who gathered in the famous abbey of Port-Royal. It is at that time that Blaise Pascal, a precocious genius of mathematics, born at Clermont-Ferrand in 1623, in order to defend his friends of Port-Royal, among whom he had withdrawn to meditate on the religious problem, published under a pseudonym the letters Provinciales against the Jesuits, one of the most tormented works of Christian literature; he then meditated on an Apologie de la religion chrétienne, for which he collected an immense body of material; these are the notes, jottings and meditations, known after his death under the title Pensées, an authentic masterpiece of French prose, in which, alongside the Augustinian spirit, one finds one of the greatest efforts made by a modern soul in seeking within itself and in the universe the pacifying Truth.

Between the first and the second half of the century the dramatic work of Pierre Corneille, of Rouen (1608-84), stands out in grandeur. To him is undoubtedly due the discovery and the consecration of the theater as a great literary and social genre. For almost fifty years he imposed, with the clarity of his style and the force of his verse, a series of tragedies in which an extraordinary poetic truth and a precise moral conscience give sublimity of human accents to the passions represented. From the Cid (1636), his masterpiece, to Horace and Cinna (1640), from Polyeucte martyr, which magnificently concludes this Roman and Christian cycle (1642), to Rodogune (1644) and Oedipe (1650), the drama of Corneille's heroes, each sharing in a fate and each at the same time master of his own will, takes its place as an unforgettable moment in the history of universal theater. One will also recall Corneille's great verse translation of the Imitation de Jésus-Christ, on which he spent six years of work.

The second half of the century gathered the marvelous fruits of the first, surpassing it, in a certain sense, in formal perfection. Louis XIV drew to his court the greatest geniuses of the time, protected them, never ceasing to provide them with occasions and pretexts for new masterpieces; and while famous architects raised Versailles for him, and talented painters and sculptors adorned its halls and gardens, Boileau, Molière and Racine celebrated his glory in literature. Before treating of these, it will be well to mention the singular work of two writers different from them, though closely bound to the spirit of the time: La Rochefoucauld and La Fontaine. Both led very agitated lives, and later consoled themselves at the fire of meditation and poetry. Of La Rochefoucauld (1613-80) there have remained famous the Réflexions or Sentences et maximes morales, which appeared in 1685, written in a very taut style, and devoted to the most varied moral problems, «one of the works that most contributed to forming the national taste and to giving it a character of perspicuity and precision» (Voltaire). La Fontaine (1621-95) created with his Fables, more than with his Contes et nouvelles, a rare and precious genre of poetry, between melancholy and smiling, in which, behind the speech of the animals (each of which retains its true or traditional character) one discerns the speech of man, who by turns mocks and regrets, good-naturedly, the customs and situations of every age. The fable thus is no longer a diversion or a harmless fiction, but, as the author himself says, «a drama of a hundred different acts, which has the universe for its stage».

Facing a poet as ingenuous and warm-hearted as La Fontaine stands a theorist as acute and enlightened as Boileau. A poet and critic, he traced in the Art poétique (1674) the happiest legislation of the classical spirit. He is acknowledged to have been wrong in misjudging the old national poetry and in despising the predecessors of Malherbe; but no one, in an age as vast and complex as his, was a finer judge of the beautiful, more severe in combating affectation or emphasis, pedantic erudition, false poetry and preciosity — in a word, all that distances one from humanity and from reason. In the Art poétique are reflected the purest values of the siècle d'or, and therefore the poetry of Molière and of Racine. Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (1622-73), called Molière, a Parisian, who lived from 1658 until his death at the court of the «sun king», drags onto the stage in the most inimitable manner the men and customs of his century, now seconding their play, now depicting them with bitter truth, and always remaining faithful, even in comic abandon, to his artistic canons, to his ideas and to his morality. Of the thirty comedies he left, some (Le bourgeois gentilhomme, Les fourberies de Scapin, Le malade imaginaire, etc.) are comedies of intrigue; others (Les précieuses ridicules, L'école des femmes, L'école des maris, Les femmes savantes, etc.) are comedies of manners; and finally, still others, truly immortal (Le misanthrope, Le tartuffe, L'avare, etc.), must be considered comedies of character. Perfect in the technique of representation, most pure and varied in language, irresistible in caricature or in buffoonery, Molière remains, as his contemporaries said, against whom he had to struggle not a little to impose his art, a contemplator and a painter of human nature; beyond his century he is a poet among the most genuine and smiling, and also an inimitable guide in our need to understand life. «Every man who knows how to read is a reader of Molière» (Sainte-Beuve).

Molière established himself in comedy, as Racine did in tragedy; but while the traditions and models of comedy in France were very poor and mediocre or of foreign derivation, tragedy had recently had a poet of Corneille's power. The effort Racine makes is to find, alongside Corneille, a place worthy of the public's understanding and admiration. Coming from Port-Royal, Jean Racine (1639-99) brought to the theater his passionate energy, the infallible taste of an art both tormented and human, whereas Corneille's had been superhuman and heroic; and he won his battle, just as, in Greek tragedy, Euripides ended up taking his place beside Sophocles. Works such as Andromaque (1667), Britannicus (1669), Bajanet (1672), Mithridate (1673), Iphigénie (1674) and Phèdre (1677) aroused the most disparate comments each time; but Phèdre failed; for twelve years Racine, in sorrow, kept silent; then, returning to the theater, stronger after long religious meditations, he imposed, this time uncontestedly, the simplicity and grandeur of his last masterpieces (Esther and Athalie). After Racine dramatic art seems to exhaust itself, and in fact it takes leave of the French stage, to return to it, after the pause of the Enlightenment, in the Romantic era. The place of the theater is held, as will be seen, by the novel. In the seventeenth century this genre is cultivated, also in epistolary form, with varying fortune; the one who imposed it, for the first time, on the admiration of contemporaries and posterity, with the Princesse de Clèves, was Madame de La Fayette (1634-93); there followed the Histoire and Contes du temps passé of Perrault, and many other novels, though far inferior to the stylistic and psychological excellence of the Princesse.

Close in spirit to the novel and the novella is epistolary literature, which reaches heights never attained again in the art of Madame de Sévigné (1626-96), author of a collection of Lettres, in which the education and culture of the time are mirrored in admirable fashion: inferior literarily are the Lettres, the Mémoires and the Entretiens sur l'éducation des filles of Madame de Maintenon; but excellent are the Mémoires of Saint-Simon, despite the carelessness of their form, and those of Card. de Retz, happy examples of a genre, between history and documentary, that would have great developments in French literature. This era, of such vast literary and artistic proportions, could not fail to find in eloquence its most fitting arena. The sacred orators triumphed, and among them all Jacques Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704), born in Dijon and having lived in Paris, not far from the court, where he was later called to educate the Dauphin. Preacher, historian, most ardent polemicist, the "eagle of Meaux," as he was called by the bishop he obtained, was an incomparable master, both for the beauty and sublimity of his style and for the depth of his thought and his perfect knowledge of the human heart. His Druisons funèbres (for Henriette de France, for Anne de Gonzague, for Louis de Bourbon, for the Prince of Condé) have all the characteristics of the great works of poetry, for their emotional sweep and their discipline of style; like the Discours sur l'histoire universelle and the Traité de la connaissance de Dieu, they occupy a unique place not only in historiography and religious treatise-writing, but in French prose. Weaker, but endowed with a subtle and innovative intelligence, François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon (1651-1715), of Cambrai, bishop, theologian, orator and philosopher, can be considered as belonging to a different era, for the practical character he impressed upon ideas and for the restlessness of his spirit. The Fables, the Dialogues des morts, and especially the famous Aventures de l'élévaque (1669), which contain many allusions and criticisms of the reign of Louis XIV, fully mark the development of his pedagogical theories, on which many generations of educators were formed; but the religious writings, the letters, the philosophical and literary dialogues reveal the complex aspect of his personality (his partial adherence to Quietism brought about the condemnation of the Exploitation des maximes des saints). To complete the vast picture of the moralistic and literary activity of this half of the century, it will suffice to mention the work of Jean de la Bruyère, a Parisian (1645-1696), an incisive and penetrating writer, who to the translation of the Caractères de Théophraste added the portrayal of the "characters" of his time, in a varied, precise and mordant language that already announces the eighteenth century. The "golden century" could not have had a more classical and typically French literary conclusion.

IV. IL SETTECENTO

Announced by a Querelle, which remained famous, between the ancients and the moderns, in which Perrault, Lamotte-Houdar and Fontenelle took part on the side of the moderns, and Racine and Boileau on the side of the ancients, the "age of enlightenment" — as the eighteenth century was called — centered literary taste and spirit no longer on the notion and experience of truth and beauty, but on those of utility. Almost all the writers of this era, who begin to desert the courts to gather in the salons, by which they are almost subjugated, intend to reform society with their works. A good part of them, trusting in reason and progress, set themselves, in writing, aims that were more or less practical. Consequently, the originality of the century lies in historical, scientific, juridical and social-polemical works; religion is neglected by the higher classes and becomes an object of polemic among the intellectual ones; and if toward the end of the century the Revolution breaks out, for the brilliant minds of the time it is already accomplished and settled twenty, thirty, forty years earlier, in a moral and cultural sense. In this atmosphere of research and expectation, the poet's first will is that of serving some purpose; and therefore lyric poetry declines, without on the other hand losing the traditional taste for form; it does, however, acquire the feeling for nature and a certain bucolic grace and lightness; while the influence of the English spirit becomes ever more precise. The names of the poets of the eighteenth century are almost forgotten, except that of Voltaire, who nevertheless imposed himself in the epic, didactic and satirical genres; and that of André Chénier (1762-1794), who towers solitary at the end of the century. The two aspects of his poetry were mentioned in passing: classical inspiration and pre-romantic sentiment. To this mature genius, cut down by the Revolution, several generations of French poets would later look, admiring the new rhythms, the wealth of symbols and images and the restless sensibility of the author of the Élégies and the Iambes.

With the name of Chénier we have touched the extreme limit of an epoch, chronologically as well. Going back to its origins, one is confronted with the work of Montesquieu. His Lettres Persanes (1721) set off at the roots the philosophical and encyclopedic spirit, the new breath of freedom that succeeded the classical spirit. The satire of institutions alternates in them with that of moral and religious principles; but the originality of the undertaking and the lucidity of the ideas must not make one forget the negative influence that these theories had on the religious conscience of the whole century, encouraging the skepticism and materialism already close to establishing themselves in every cultural sector. Montesquieu's historical and observational qualities are better revealed — he was in life (1698-1755) a precise and scrupulous magistrate — in the Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur et de la décadence des Romains (1744) and especially in the Esprit des lois (1748), where for the first time the principle of the separation of powers is affirmed. The revolutionary spirit of Montesquieu is taken up, enriched, and in a certain sense magnified, by the vast, bold and curious work of François-Marie Arouet, known as Voltaire, certainly the most eighteenth-century genius that France has had. Born in Paris in 1691, after a contradictory education he devoted himself to political satire and the theater; he visited England, Prussia, where he was received by Frederick II, and finally settled, at the height of his glory, at Ferney, near Geneva, never ceasing to write and to take an interest in the most significant problems and events of the time. He died in Paris in 1758. There is no literary genre that Voltaire did not cultivate: tragedy (Zaïre, Mérope), history (Histoire de Charles XII, Le siècle de Louis XIV), the novel and the short story (Candide, Zadig, Micromégas, etc.), criticism (Le temple du goût), epic (La Henriade, Poème de Fontenoy), lyric poetry, and above all philosophy (Lettres philosophiques, Dictionnaire philosophique, Essai sur les moeurs, etc.), always releasing from his writings, together with the irreligiosity that later became proverbial, the most varied ideas, the most unexpected cultural and social references. Ambitious, full of vanity, superficial in three quarters of his work, what will remain of Voltaire, however, is the penetrating clarity of his style, which had no equal in his time.

To increase the influence of the new principles, and to make these theories popular, a collective work was not lacking: the Encyclopédie or Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (whose first volumes appeared in 1751). D'Alembert and Diderot undertook to direct it, assisted by Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau and by other famous writers, Buffon, Condorcet, Condillac, Helvétius, D'Holbach, Turgot, Necker, Marmontel. A true war machine in the service of the philosophical doctrines of the eighteenth century, as it was defined, despite the exaggerations, the materialistic fanaticism and the doctrinal errors, the Encyclopédie nevertheless brought notable benefits to scientific knowledge, and cannot be neglected in the history of human thought. In the same period, however, there remained in the shadows, and it is a duty today to bring it to light, that grandiose body of historical research conducted by the Benedictines of the Congregation of St. Maur, which goes under the name of Histoire littéraire de la France.

In associating Rousseau and Diderot with the Encyclopédie, they have been mentioned. These are perhaps the most singular and genuine writers of the century; they gain for French literature new logical and fantastic dimensions, which must be taken into account, even if one cannot fail to underline, especially for Diderot's work, the skeptical and irreligious spirit that lies at the basis of his literary travail. Of the two, Rousseau is certainly the more tormented. Born in Geneva (1712-78) and endowed with a fantastic and dreamy temperament, prone to utopias, Jean-Jacques Rousseau undoubtedly led an agitated life; this restlessness was translated into a great part of his works, in which he advocated, as is well known, the return to the state of nature, and recognized in Nature the only divinity to be obeyed. The pedagogical works, Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) and the Émile (1763), are usually isolated within his production; but apart from the originality of the germs of thought, the aspects of his art and quality, entirely dictated by sentiment, are found more abundantly in the Confessions and above all in the Rêveries d'un promeneur solitaire, belonging to the last years of his life, to which the romantics later looked as to books foreshadowing their taste. Of Denis Diderot, born in Langres (1713-84), one will remember the novels (Jacques le fataliste, La religieuse), some successful satire (Le neveu de Rameau), the dramas (Le fils naturel, Le père de famille), where the taste for paradox, the elegance of ideas, the acuteness of analysis are admired, even when they are ends in themselves; but it is perhaps in the vast Correspondance that one finds this man in his entirety, complex and simple at the same time, passionate dreamer and cold realist, a critic to whom important discoveries in the field of painting, music and the theater are owed.

On a plane of naturalistic ingenuousness and abandon, any work of Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot is surpassed by the novel Paul et Virginie (1787) by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737-1814), who was the first to make the exotic note resound in French narrative. But it is not the only masterpiece of the eighteenth-century French novel. When it does not devote itself, as too often happens, to the description of intrigues or frivolities, when it does not abandon itself to an ambiguous analysis of society (as in Les liaisons dangereuses by Laclos) or when finally it does not reach sadism, as in the work of the notorious Marquis de Sade, the novel of the period expresses, sometimes with curious anticipation, certain states of mind that would be found again in the Romanticism and Naturalism of the 19th century. To give a few examples, mention will be made of the Manon Lescaut of the abbé Prévost, of the Obermann of Sénancour (already, however, exceeding the bounds of the 18th century), of the tales of Marivaux, of the Gil Blas of Le Sage (1712). Both Marivaux and Le Sage also have an attainable place in the dramatic production of this century. Marivaux (1688-1763), who was the creator of many successful comedies (La surprise de l'amour, Le jeu de l'amour et du hasard, Les serments indiscrets, etc.), conducted with subtlety and delicate fervor, and Le Sage, who brings much of the Spanish spirit into Turcaret, announce the sprightly art of a comic genius such as Beaumarchais (1742-99). Le barbier de Séville and Le mariage de Figaro, comedies satirically but also poetically happy, brought their author immense success. They are still today a key to understanding the spirit of the time and that reforming impulse that was not lacking in any French writer before and during the Revolution.

The dramatic aspects of the life and society of France are found, however, more than in the theater, in the art of oratory, which in this period sometimes touched the heights of great eloquence. It certainly touched them with Mirabeau. Mirabeau's speech is colorful and vehement and draws its color and its force from the things to be said, unlike that of his seventeenth-century predecessors, humanistic and emphatic. Even today it is admired in the pages on the Droit de paix et de guerre, on the Sanction royale, etc. Against Mirabeau, the abbé Maury, a great defender of the interests of the monarchy and of the rights of the Church, stood, sometimes with success. Yet this whole era saw famous orators: Vergniaud, Danton, Robespierre, Cazalès, Barnave, who carried away men and crowds.

Shut away in the silence of libraries, but no less historically important, are the thirty-six volumes of the Histoire naturelle of Buffon (1707-88), devoted to the observation of facts and the analysis of natural experiences, which undoubtedly represent the greatest effort made by a French writer, after the Humanism, to bring back to the unity of thought and to the vivifying enthusiasm of poetry the arid material of science. They are perhaps the highest and most majestic message of eighteenth-century thought.

V. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

In the passage from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, many historical conditions and states of mind must be kept in mind, which would influence the thought and imagination of writers: the decline of eighteenth-century materialism and cosmopolitanism, the experience of social utopias and of the Revolution, the attraction toward moral and religious problems, the national spirit, bourgeois individualism. Individualism, religiosity and historicism distinguish the new literature, even without taking into account the practical elements due to the schools and the influence of the great spirits. When one speaks of Romanticism, one touches the extremes of this inner renewal, which takes place throughout all of Europe, but starts substantially from France with the work of Chateaubriand and of Madame de Staël. "Cease to look to Greece and to Rome," the latter says to the writers of her time - "seek the sources of inspiration in national history, in your traditions, in your legends. Draw inspiration from religion, so that your art may gain in depth and in sensibility." Well informed about the development of German philosophy and art, Madame de Staël (1766-1817) popularized its spirit in the four books of De l'Allemagne (1820), concluding by affirming the supremacy of inspiration over rules, of feeling over reason, of individualism and liberty over authority. A foe of Napoleon, besides Staël, was also François-René de Chateaubriand (1768-1848), born at Saint-Malo, who in his youth pushed as far as America, then lived in his homeland through the first years of the Revolution, until, having emigrated to London and already in the grip of a spiritual crisis, he decided to give himself entirely to the cause of the Restoration. He died in Paris after having been ambassador and minister of Foreign Affairs under the Bourbons. His work, passionate, imaginative, eloquent, endowed with descriptive power and musicality, was spent in the apology of Christianity (Le génie du christianisme, 1802), interpreted with rare literary effectiveness, and in the novelistic illustration (Atala, René) of certain passages of the book. The success of these works was enormous (René had as many admirers and imitators as Goethe's Werther), but even more revealing of Chateaubriand's religious consciousness are the volumes that followed, Les martyrs (1809), Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem, and finally the masterpiece, Mémoires d'outre-tombe, published posthumously, where the soul of this restless and tenacious genius is revealed, a true renewer of aesthetic taste and of historical and religious feeling.

Leaving aside the defenders of authority, Louis de Bonald, Joseph de Maistre (vigorous and severe author of the Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg and of the Histoire de l'Église gallicane) and Xavier de Maistre (to whom we owe the brilliant Voyage autour de ma chambre and Le lépreux de la cité d'Aoste), and coming to the Romantics, their movement can be divided into two circles: the first, called that of the Arsenal, around 1823-24, and the second, around Hugo, in 1828. It is in the latter, however, that the battle against the Classicists is fought to the bitter end, and they, after 1830, disappear from the literary scene. The Romantic spirit then spreads through France, with the work of Lamartine, Hugo, de Vigny, Musset, George Sand, Balzac, and Dumas père, while Stendhal remains apart, whose narrative works would not be appreciated until much later. With Romanticism, unrest entered French literature, and the primitive impulse, even without being exhausted, turned toward new aspects, barely twenty years after its affirmation. By the middle of the century, one already witnesses, with the Parnasse and the realist novel, a falling back of Romanticism upon its own motifs, and therefore the liquidation of the movement.

It is illustrated, however, from its very birth, by Victor Hugo, born at Besançon (1802-85), who left unforgettable traces in lyric poetry, in the theater and in the novel. From the Odes et ballades (1826) to the dramas Cromwell (1827), Hernani (1829), Le roi s'amuse (1832) and Ruy Blas (1838), to the novels Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) and Les misérables (1862), one can follow the continuous flow of Hugo's imagination, now animated by legend, now by political ideas, now by history, now by the author's sentimental ferment, but perhaps, more than to the dramas and the novels, to understand it fully one must turn to the best lyric works: Les feuilles d'automne (1831), Les voix intérieures, Les châtiments (1833), la Légende des siècles (1859). Inspiration and richness of feeling are not lacking either in Alphonse de Lamartine (1799-1869), born at Mâcon, a typical exponent of the Romanticism of the first manner, who sang with deep and gentle melancholy the raptures of ideal love, of nature and of God, in the Premières méditations (1820) and in the Nouvelles méditations (1823); he analyzed himself with ardor in the novel Graziella (1851), and finally touched on philosophical and religious themes in Jocelyn and in La chute d'un ange, but with lesser artistic result. To this moral and religious vein the poetry of Alfred de Vigny (1797-1863) also had to submit, born at Loches to a noble family, whom criticism, which knew it little in his own time, today regards as the most significant and complete poet of the first Romantic season. It is a poetry of ideas, rich, profound and endowed with a moral and religious impetus (see the posthumous collection of the Destinées, or also the Poèmes antiques et modernes, 1825), which at times becomes desperate or resigned, such is the solitude from which it starts and to which it arrives. Another nature is that of Alfred de Musset (1810-57), a Parisian, author, besides of verses famous in his time, of exquisite theatrical compositions (Fantasio, On ne badine pas avec l'amour, etc.) and of singular Confessions d'un enfant du siècle (1836) where the so-called mal du siècle is described through vicissitudes of passion and dream. De Musset is, certainly, among all, the poet who approached love, melancholy and death with the most passion, but not with that moral force that Hugo and Vigny at times made felt. The poetry of this time has a wholly melancholic and intoxicated color, and therefore one risks confusing it within a single vague latitude. Some poets (such as Gérard de Nerval and Maurice de Guérin), however, turn their gaze, albeit uncertainly, toward the future, and will therefore be appreciated many years later.

The case of Stendhal is singular: having lived in the full Romantic age (1783-1842), he had few and not happy contacts with French literary circles, preferring to his homeland, and above all to his city (Grenoble), Italy, where, after alternating political and literary vicissitudes, he ended up moving. He is a writer rich in impulses and passions, hidden in a cold, chancery-like style, as it was said; and therefore his novels (Le Rouge et le Noir, La Chartreuse de Parme, etc.), although so full of Romantic psychology, open onto another age: realism. The most representative writer of the early nineteenth century remains Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), a most prolific novelist (one recalls Eugénie Grandet, Le père Goriot, César Birotteau) of vivid and powerful imagination, of incomparable caricatural art, in which a great knowledge of life always vibrates. Balzac can be considered as much a Romantic as a realist: in any case, however, he belongs to the great family of the creators of characters, and therefore holds a place of the first order in the French literature of the last century.

The most resolute step between the first and the second half of the nineteenth century is taken by poetry. Between the Parnasse, to which the name of Leconte de Lisle (1818-94) is especially linked, where the principle of art for art's sake was adopted and decreed the impersonality and impassibility of the poet, and Charles Baudelaire, born in 1821 (1841-67), there are many bonds and affinities; but the genius of Baudelaire (Fleurs du mal, 1857) surpassed the characteristics of the school, situating itself in a highly personal zone: his poetry, essentially Christian, even when it sinks its roots into evil and disorder, is perhaps the most plastic, the purest and most musical of the entire century. The problem of artistic creation, for Baudelaire, is not only a problem of tears, as in so many Romantics, or of impassibility, or of literary technique, but of conscience and of profound inner debate. More constant in absolving his own heart and describing its changing throbs, but sometimes artificial, is Paul Verlaine (1844-96), who has to his credit a vast lyrical production (Poèmes saturniens, Fêtes galantes, La bonne chanson, Sagesse, etc.), and to whose name the birth of Symbolisme is linked, the second great movement of the poetry of this era. With Verlaine was associated, through brief but intensely vivid human and literary events, Arthur Rimbaud (1857-91), in whom many critics have recognized a seer's soul. In Rimbaud poetry becomes a burning expression of life and of truth, and rises to incredible heights; but with resolve the poet abandons it, at only twenty years of age, fleeing to Africa, and surrendering himself to his destiny as a meteor. It will be, finally, Mallarmé (1842-98) who takes up the same impulse again, coldly, hermetically, with a resoluteness and a fervor that have no equal in our age. For him symbolism has become something more than a literary school: a way of conceiving poetry, from which the poets of our century, in France and elsewhere, will depart but little.

The novel, in the footsteps of Balzacian realism, risks many dangers, because of the prevailing tendency to describe reality without dominating it from within, but it is saved by the work of Flaubert and Maupassant, and partially by that of Zola, the Goncourts and Daudet. In these the novel is not only, even perhaps when it wishes to be, "a representation of nature and of ourselves with a view to the physical and moral perfection of our species," according to the expression of Proudhon; in Flaubert (1821-80), as it had been, before naturalism, in Mérimée, a sober, precise, attentive writer, the art of narration becomes an inner search according to a method of integral realism, but no less artistic and effective for that. The serenity of Flaubert, obtained at the price of so many sacrifices of style, becomes impassibility in too many works of Émile Zola, a combative theorist of the naturalistic school (in the series of the Rougon-Macquart, defined by J. Lemaitre as "a pessimistic epoch of human animality," his method borders on the one dear to positivist science) and without doubt a better writer in his tales with a fantastic background (cf. Le rêve). In Daudet (1840-97), the impressionistic and comic vein prevails: it produces a masterpiece of humanity such as Tartarin de Tarascon; in Maupassant (author of the famous Boule de suif, of Bel Ami and of Pierre et Jean, etc.) the psychological and passionate vein prevails, with sometimes surprising results of color and style. Also dear to the generations between the '80s and the beginning of the twentieth century were the novels of Pierre Loti and of Paul Bourget, the former set in exotic surroundings, the latter rich in penetrating psychological analyses, of an anti-materialistic character. A tormented writer, and finally liberated by faith, is Huysmans, in whom one finds again all the restlessness of this era of transition, which from the last offshoots of Romanticism, through naturalism and positivism, was to blossom into the idealism of the early years of the twentieth century.

Certainly the narrative literature of the second part of the nineteenth century is the most hybrid and restless sector. The historians, the philosophers, the critics, the orators, and finally the dramatists, who renew and deepen the schemas already sufficiently provided by the eighteenth century, avail themselves in turn of the changed perspectives of custom and thought, often anticipating them with flashing acuteness. Among the historians, we can distinguish a picturesque and descriptive school, which has its head in Thierry (1795-1856) and Michelet (1798-1874), a philosophical school, represented by Guizot (1787-1874), by Mignet, by Taine, author of the famous Origines de la France contemporaine, and finally by Renan, whose studies on Judaism and on Christianity are well known. A true modern historian, accurate in investigation and impartial in judgment, is Adolphe Thiers (1797-1877), whose name is linked to an excellent history of the French Revolution. To literary criticism the most acute, perhaps, among the men of letters of the Romantic era was to consecrate the best of his activity: Charles-Augustin de Sainte-Beuve (1804-69), to whom we owe masterly and colorful portraits of writers, and the most sagacious judgments on the literary production of the time. In this sector, inaugurated by Chateaubriand, by Madame de Staël, the Girardin, the Nisard, the Taine managed to establish themselves, and at a later time, the Paris, the Claretie, the Brunetière, the Lemaitre and the Faguet.

Certain dramatic authors still preserve the prestige, which time has not weakened, of poetic truth and of fantasy, authors who aroused, in their time, enthusiastic approval: reference is made here to Eugène Scribe, author of vaudevilles and of subtle comedies, to Émile Augier, to Dumas fils, to Victorien Sardou, and to Edmond Rostand, author of the celebrated Cyrano de Bergerac. With Henry Becque, toward the end of the century, the theater assumes its function of criticism of morals.

VI. THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

The first fifty years of this century see, besides the perpetuation of many models and the dilution of certain typically nineteenth-century states of mind, the swarming of literary schools completely different in spirit and in forms. France does not lose her function as a forge of novelties and of new technical and spiritual experiments. And if it is too soon to give an overall judgment on current literary production, some more typical figures already indicate, through the variety of expressions and the originality of creative work, the limits of the age, consumed by a formal travail such as no century had, and at the same time drunk with clarification in every sense and direction of spiritual life. Poetry, after the icy and secret difficulties to which the genius of Mallarmé had pushed it, takes on metaphysical flights and color in the work of Paul Valéry (1871-1945), is enchanted in the delicate and elegiac rhythms of Francis Jammes (1868-1938), breaks into Dionysian and mystical forms, of a colorful dramatic quality, in Paul Claudel (b. 1868), one of the greatest Catholic poets of the twentieth century, to flow finally into the irrationality of the surrealist movement, in which it finds itself entangled today. To the novel and to the prose of ideas writers diverse and in many respects contrasting bind the charm of their rich personality: yesterday Anatole France and Maurice Barrès, today or only yesterday, André Gide and Marcel Proust. Gide and Proust are perhaps the least ephemeral masters of all this troubled and divided age, which has already seen wars, bewilderments, disappointments, in every European soul and above all in the sensitive French soul, so ready to reveal itself and to question itself in the depths. A fanatical seeker of truth, wherever it may be found, captious and biting, but always tireless in his own attempts, Gide can be taken as a symbol of all of today's literature, just as Proust can be considered the historian of the supreme illusions of poetry: to seek with art the time lost. Alongside them, but not always close in spirit, are to be considered the novelists Giraudoux and Mauriac (the latter singularly engaged with the religious problem), Daniel-Rops and Bernanos, the poets Apollinaire and Jacob, while gradually the proponents and disciples of the various movements and various tendencies, which never cease to appear and disappear in our age, are lost in the memory of literary chronicles. To French literature, which has so admirably interpreted in the past the major demands of the spirit, not excluding those of the religious spirit, are undoubtedly bound many of our present hopes for a complete renewal of Western civilization.

Giacinto Spagnoletti

# IV. ART

I. ROMANESQUE ART (ARCHITECTURE AND SCULPTURE)

The first manifestations of French art, after the fall of Roman rule, are not autonomous. The Visigoths (in the south), the Burgundians (in the east), and the Franks (in the north) did not bring about the birth of a new great monumental art, which did not arise even with the advent of Clovis (482) and the Merovingian dynasty and the consequent unification of the peoples of Gaul. Taste, however, found expression particularly in goldsmithing, in which motifs derived from the East recur, interpreted with an original spirit (v. BARBARICA ARTE). Even the architectures of which scanty remains have survived declare a dependence on Byzantine monuments (e.g., St-Pierre of Vienne [Isère]). Once the Merovingians had fallen, political upheaval was followed by the decline of art, until Charlemagne reconnected with the artistic traditions transmitted by antiquity as seen through Byzantium and the Christian East. The first manifestations of a French architecture, in which those fermenting elements that would mature in Romanesque art are already contained, are encountered precisely in what was called the Carolingian Renaissance (v. CAROLINCIA ARTE). And it is not merely a matter of the appearance of certain specific structural elements but of the value that the various formal elements of architecture assume. Thus, more than in the Palatine Chapel of Aachen (consecrated in 805), echoing San Vitale in Ravenna, new elements are found in the small church of Germignydes-Près, in St-Philbert of Grandlieu (Loire), at Cravant (Indre-et-Loire), at Jumièges (940): apses flanked by smaller apses appear, as do lantern towers and piers. Of the frescoes and mosaics that decorated the walls, only scanty remains have come down to us (e.g., Martyrdom of St. Stephen, 9th century, at St-Pantaléon-les-Autun). Sculpture was then poor and crude; instead, illumination (v.), enamels (v.), goldsmithing (v.), and ivories (v.) enjoyed splendor, in which is found
FRANCE - Portal of the church of St-Seurin (1260) - Bordeaux.

the classical taste of the compositions and of the relief with delicate and meticulous workmanship.

The first great expression of French art after the Carolingian is the Romanesque (v. ABBEY; ROMANESQUE ART). It was born around the turn of the 10th century and received great impetus from monastic civilization, and it availed itself of many motifs derived from classical and Byzantine art, but all reworked and recreated so that one can speak of a true conquest of new means of expression. The great novelty of Romanesque architecture was the use of covering buildings with vaults, whence followed the renewal of structures. However, French Romanesque architecture did not have a unified character, and the various regions stamped it with their own taste and with the spirit of their own culture. One of the oldest churches is that of Jumièges (Normandy, 1640-67), covered with vaults only in the minor nave, as is also St-Etienne of Caen. The 12th century marked the full development of Romanesque art with the construction of the vast church of Cluny (v.), from which a whole series of churches derived (v. BORDONONA ARTE; Paray-le-Monial; La Madeleine of Vézelay; St-Lazare of Avallon). In Auvergne the Romanesque organism had particular complexity and vigor: there were churches with tribunes with the quarter-cylinder vault in the side aisles, minor apses and the tower rising from the central crossing (Notre-Dame-du-Port at Clermont-Ferrand; churches of St-Neumire; Orcival). Languedoc adopted the characteristics of Auvergne, conferring a particular physiognomy through the use of brick (St-Saturnin of Toulouse). In Provence the single-nave plan was preferred (Digne; Notre-Dame-de-Dome at Avignon). The wealth of classical remains has conferred a singular appearance on the Provençal churches, in which fragments of ancient marbles, friezes and columns are placed alongside the Romanesque decorations. In Poitou the churches have naves of equal height, with barrel vaults (Notre-Dame-la-Grande of Poitiers, St-Savin-sur-Gartempe, Vienne). In Normandy the facades are characterized by tall towers (Trinité et St-

Etienne of Caen). In Périgord the presence of the dome is very important, felt as a pure, complete geometric harmony without decorations (St-Front of Périgueux). The rebirth of architecture marked the resurgence of plastic decoration, which is by now closely coordinated with architecture itself. The portals and the capitals receive the most varied figurations which, even in the differentiations impressed by the various regional schools (since one still cannot speak of personalities), are united by certain common characteristics: above all, the awakening of plastic consciousness that rediscovers the human form, and the need to express the inner life. From this derive the figurative synthesis and the expressive power that burst forth from formal stylization. The ornamentation that sprouted luxuriantly abandoned the old repertoire, creating new motifs: in place of geometric ones, zoomorphic ones flourished, often with allegorical meaning. The new language remained substantially common to all Romanesque sculpture: from the long, flat figures of the Burgundian sculptors to the robust ones of Languedoc, to those suffused with pictorial values of Poitou. The iconographic repertoire is that supplied by Byzantine miniatures and ivories; drawing on this world, the Romanesque sculptors wish to infuse it with life, and they throw the hierarchical figures into tumultuous gestures and contort them to overcome rigidity, with violent expressiveness (Christ of St-Pierre of Moissac; Prophets of Souillac, in Dordogne; Christ in a tympanum of Vézelay; the Last Judgment of Autun of impressive dramatic quality; the Christ of the tympanum of St-Foi of Conques).

II. GOTHIC ART

The Middle Ages called "opus francigenum," thus unequivocally specifying its origin, that architecture which the Renaissance, with a misunderstood pejorative meaning, called Gothic (v. GOTHIC ART). The Romanesque conquest of the vault found in Gothic architecture its completion and its conclusion. The first examples begin in the middle of the 12th century in the Ile-de-France and its consequences extend to the middle of the 16th century. The pointed arch, the ribbed vault, the flying buttress are the structural elements of the new architecture; from the coordination of these is born a new aesthetic language. The vaults no longer rest on the walls, but on the pillars which come to constitute the sole skeleton of the construction; the thrust is counterbalanced by the flying buttresses which discharge to the exterior all the weight of the vaults themselves. Once the technical formula was found, the architects could give free rein to their imagination to the utmost: first of all to reach the greatest heights, which it was enough to balance with a correspondingly greater opening of the flying buttress. The harmony of the vertical lines, the rhythm of the multiple pillars, the interweavings of the ribs, illusorily remove limit from the space of the vast and austere interiors; these now live on pure architectural values since every element of mass no longer indispensable to the statics of the building can be abolished; thus the walls are abolished and are replaced by immense stained-glass windows, and because of the predominant value of architecture even sculpture comes to be subordinated to it: it is inscribed along the projections of the deep portals, on the columns, on the capitals, in the rose windows; thus the tall facades enclosed between two tall bell towers concentrate all the plastic decoration.

The first great building that inaugurates the new taste is St-Denis, for whose construction the abbot Suger called in 1132 architects from all over France; shortly afterward a marvelous flowering followed in all the regions: Noyon, Senlis, St-Remi of Reims and finally Notre-Dame of Paris (1163-82) concludes this first period of Gothic art in which the essentiality of the structure predominates. From the 13th to the 14th century the architects proceed toward a greater lightening of the construction and toward an enrichment of the ornamentation: the spires, the pinnacles, the cornices of the immense portals that clothe themselves with sculptures, the marble lacework of the rose windows and of the broad windows multiply (e.g., the rebuilt Notre-Dame of Chartres [1198-1260], the cathedrals of Reims, Amiens [1220-88], Beauvais, Strasbourg, Metz). The architects who impose their own style are J. de Chelles, author of the transept of Notre-Dame of Paris, and Pierre de Montreuil, architect of St-Germain-des-Prés, who completed the south crossing of Notre-Dame. Under their influence was built the Ste-Chapelle (1240-48) in which the liberation of the mass of the wall is carried to its extreme consequences; the cathedral of Troyes, the facade of that of Strasbourg. In the south J. Dechamps dominated (cathedrals of Clermont-Ferrand, Narbonne and Limoges). After these supreme conquests the taste for excessive ornamentation led to the dissolution of structural compactness, to a trite and exuberant decorative virtuosity (facade of the cathedral of Rouen, St-Jacques of Dieppe, cathedrals of Evreux, of Nantes).

III. SCULPTURE

The liberation from pictorialism and the attainment of a purely plastic organic quality was the great innovation of the sculptors of the Gothic period. The iconographic sources were also renewed.

The composition took on a new character because of the need to conform to the taste that marked the new architectural forms, and the agitated gesturing of the crowded Romanesque compositions was succeeded in the earliest manifestations of Gothic sculpture by a hieratic calm that in some respects seems to link up even with the purity of Greek statuary.

The oldest testimonies of Gothic sculpture can be identified in the portal of St-Denis (c. 1140) with figures set against the columns and along the slopes of the lunette. Immediately afterwards Chartres became the school of French sculpture with the splendid "portal of the kings" (c. 1150), followed by that of Ste-Anne at Notre-Dame in Paris; and then Etampes, Angers, Le Mans, Amiens, Reims. But simultaneously with the evolution of architecture, plastic simplicity too, from the middle of the 13th century, yields to the search for pictorial effects; from the south and north porches and portals of Chartres, with figures of a very soft modelling but still solemn, one arrives at images more lively in their attitudes, more animated, such as the Queen of Sheba, the famous Angel known as the "Smile" of Reims, the Virgin with the Child of Notre-Dame in Paris. This refined grace ends by falling into affected mannerism, while from the intention of renewal is born the search for realism. This finds its field especially in portraiture, of which notable examples survive (Charles V, Joan of Bourbon, in the Louvre). In the 15th century the greatest personality is Claus Sluter, who with the tomb of Philip the Bold and of John the Fearless (Museum of Dijon) leaves the model of the realistic funerary monument. At the same time, through the work of Michel Colombe, the reaction is born which, however, does not create a new language, but evokes the delicacy of Gothic modelling without reviving its lyricism (sculptures of the cathedral of Nantes; bas-relief with St. George and the dragon in the Louvre). G. Regnault and G. Chaleveu spread the manner and taste of Colombe through the great sacred groups.

If the cathedral was the highest expression of medieval architecture, one cannot forget that at the same time feudal society was building its castles, of which, for the most part, only the ruins have come down to us. The plan, which remained substantially unchanged, consisted of a compact construction with a curtain wall flanked by powerful towers. The first example was Château-Gaillard (Normandy), built by Richard the Lionheart; shortly afterwards Philip Augustus had the Louvre built. In the 13th century that of Vincennes arose. In the 14th century the Papal Palace of Avignon (v.) was of particular importance, and the castles of Charles V and of his brothers, the dukes of Berry, Burgundy and Orléans, were famous. Meanwhile the types of civil architecture were becoming fixed (the Hôtel de Cluny, in Paris; the Palais de Justice of Rouen; the town hall of St-Quentin), which were to endure for a long time. Indeed the Gothic did not fully die out even when in the 15th-16th century France came to know the Italian Renaissance, which influenced especially painting and sculpture. The Gothic taste, in the extreme expression of the "flamboyant," persisted above all in sacred architecture, in which it often combined with Renaissance motifs (St-Pierre of Caen; St-Eustache and St-Etienne-du-Mont in Paris), and survived in the castles: the castle of Chantilly, those of Plessis-les-Tours, of Perpignan, of Blois, repeat the type of the medieval castle modernized by the introduction of Italian decorative elements.

IV. PAINTING FROM THE ROMANESQUE AGE TO THE 15TH CENTURY

In painting too, the abbey of Cluny was one of the most important centers of diffusion. One of the most interesting pictorial complexes of the Burgundian group is in the chapel of Berzé-la-Ville (Martyrdom of St. Lawrence): the painting rivals mosaic in the rendering of precious decorative effects; the abstract and solemn figures in sumptuous garments reveal a perfect adherence to Byzantine models. In the artistic milieu that matured in Poitou and Berry, painting is lighter and more spontaneous; a popular tradition derived from Carolingian art nonetheless remains. Light tones predominate, the garments are draped with broad, loose folds. The Moses with the Tables of the Law (church of St-Savin-sur-Gartempe) and the Constantine of the baptistery of Poitiers can be considered the first examples of a truly "French" art. Because of its humanity, the art of Poitou had a wide diffusion: at St-Gilles-de-Montoire (Loire), at St-Jacques-des-Guérets (Loire), at Laget (Touraine), etc., and at Tavant (Indre-et-Loire), where the Descent of Christ into Limbo achieved highly dramatic effects; and again in Berry (church of Vicq), in Maine (Château-Gontier), where it enjoyed a most flourishing life.

Even in the Gothic era, when in the churches it is reduced to a secondary role, painting still finds full development in the castles, where it adapts itself to a particularly refined, aristocratic taste. Narrating the life of illustrious personages (Caesar's Associates in the Castle of Vaudreuil), or celebrating contemporary events (Expedition of the French into Sicily, at the Castle of Confluus), or allegories (it suffices to mention the much-repeated Fountain of Youth); or subjects inspired by literature and particularly by the chivalric poems (Castle of Estampes). And finally the great vogue of tapestries (v.) began, whose illustrative and narrative character also influenced wall painting: the taste for little hunting or fishing scenes began, against a background of flowering greenery; fairy-tale gardens in which graceful, slender and delicate figures move, dressed with refined, heraldic elegance (Palace of the Popes at Avignon, Castle of Sorgues). Unfortunately only a few fragmentary examples remain of this art pervaded by an elegance and a luxury that does not remain merely an element of taste but is identified with the artistic form.

In the Gothic cathedrals, with the walls opened by the great windows, painting, confined to limited spaces, now has an essentially ornamental function. In the end it shifts its interests to another technique, the stained-glass window (v.). The stained-glass window, with its luminosity heightened by the juxtaposition of complementary colors, has a vital function in Gothic architecture; never, perhaps, as at that moment have architecture and decoration been so closely linked. Arisen at St-Denis, the stained-glass window developed at Chartres, which served as a school to the other cathedrals in the first half of the 13th century. Around 1250, Paris became the center of this new artistic expression, which reached its highest expressions in the Ste-Chapelle and at Notre-Dame, in the cathedral of Angers, St-Etienne of Auxerre, the cathedral of Poitiers, etc., and, in the 14th century, at St-Pierre in Chartres, the cathedral of Evreux, the cathedral of Rouen, etc.

At the end of the 14th century Paris takes an important place in the history of French painting. In the city already famous for its ivories, its miniatures and for the tapestries of which, together with Arras, it held the monopoly, a school is formed from which the first personalities emerge. Characteristics of the school of Paris are the loftiness of the drawing, the clarity of the composition, the elegant elongation of the slender figures that stand out against the gold background with an ivory pallor. Even in the sacred scenes these personages often appear, bearing the echo of the refined world of the court (e.g., the diptych of Richard II with the Virgin and Child among a choir of angels, attributed to André Beauneveu [ca. 1390,

London, National Gallery]; portrait of John the Good, attributed to Gérard d'Orléans [ca. 1360, Paris, Petit Palais], painted with a freedom that, even through the crude physiognomic realism of the sharp profile, achieves a subtle spiritual characterization).

The art of the school of Paris spread through the provinces. It took on a particular character in the duchy of Burgundy, where from contact with other artistic languages (Italian and Flemish) it gave rise to the so-called Franco-Flemish art, characterized by a taste for architectural backgrounds and for the at times brutally rendered characterization of the figures. Maloual and Bellechose (Retable of St-Denis, Louvre), M. Broederlam (Episodes from the Life of the Virgin, at Dijon, 1394-99), G. Beaumetz are the artists who spread this taste. Another important center was Avignon, where from the encounter of Italian art with that of Paris a new taste was born (e.g., the Retable of Touzon; triptych of the Museum of Angers) that also spread into upper Piedmont (castles of Fenis and of Mante).

The school of Paris declined into manneristic forms which in the 14th century, while Flemish art was developing, whose technical and formal innovations French painting welcomed, through this contamination recovered their originality, which manifested itself in a reconquest of monumentality. The principal centers were Provence and the Loire valley. The artists of Aix and Avignon freed themselves from the influences of Sienese and Catalan art and created a new language marked by an interior monumentality, by a plastic modeling, and by light and warm tonalities. At last the great compositions have a life of their own and are no longer enlarged miniatures. Examples: the Annunciation panel of the church of the Madeleine of Aix (ca. 1412), to whose unknown author a true artistic personality has been recognized (Master of the Annunciation of Aix); the anonymous Pietà of Villeneuve-les-Avignon (Paris, Petit Palais), the Coronation of E. Charonton (1453, Villeneuve-les-Avignon), the Virgin of Mercy of Charonton and P. Villate (Museum of Chantilly).

Of capital importance for the history of French art was the Loire valley, where the most interesting personality of this period, J. Fouquet (1425-1480 ca.), established himself. After a brief stay in Italy (he painted the portrait - lost - of Eugene IV) he settled in Tours where, before 1474, he became the painter of the court of Louis XI. His style, which rejected the motifs of Flamboyant Gothic, expressed itself with clarity and balance of composition and with powerful psychological characterization of portraits (Giovanni degli Orsini, Charles VII, at the Petit Palais; Étienne Chevalier with St. Stephen, at the Berlin Museum). Fouquet expressed the same qualities in the miniatures, to which he gave the spatiality, the monumentality and the fluency of grand compositions. Those of the Jewish Antiquities of Josephus, which Fouquet illustrated for the Duke of Nemours, are certainly his. Fouquet's work was continued by his sons François and Louis and by various pupils; but the elements that in the master's art were style became in his followers a cipher and a taste for "genre". The Master of Moulins emerged, identified with J. Perréal, in whom the lesson of Fouquet, of the Fleming Van der Goes and of the Italians yields motifs that are assimilated and recreated with a taste for plastic modelling, and a realism of popular vein (Nativity of the Museum of Autun, St. Maurice of the Glasgow Museum, the retable of Moulins, various portraits).

V. THE RENAISSANCE AND ITALIAN INFLUENCE IN ARCHITECTURE AND SCULPTURE

The taste of the Italian Renaissance penetrated into F. through Italian works (tomb of Louis XII and Anne of Brittany by Antonio and Giovanni Giusti; sepulcher of Robert Lannoy and Folleville, by Antonio della Porta, etc.) or through the artists themselves (G. Mazzoni's atelier in Paris was very frequented); until Francis I officially introduced Italian art, first calling Leonardo and Andrea del Sarto, then Primaticcio and Rosso with their collaborators to the Castle of Fontainebleau: from then on, for more than a century, French art was oriented toward Italian models. The monument in which the new architectural taste is summed up is the Louvre, whose reconstruction P. Lescot began (1547) after having demolished the old building of Philip Augustus, transformed by Charles V. Lescot conceived an immense palace with four wings around a central courtyard. He was able to complete only the west wing and the adjoining side of the south wing, but his work was fundamental and had such a character that the artists who continued the work in the following century felt bound to it. From this moment, the orders, the pediments and the other elements that Lescot derived from the Italian Renaissance became part of the French language and prompted new research: G. Bullant in the Palace of Ecouen adopted the single order for the first time; at the Tuileries and at Fontainebleau F. Delorme likewise sought the purity of classicizing forms of Italian origin.

Sculpture, in second place, expressed the same ideals. Two personalities dominated that period: J. Goujon, a seeker of flowing rhythms and precious refinements of modeling (sculptures at the Louvre; the Fountain of the Innocents, 1549, in Paris; Diana and bust of Henry III, at the Louvre); G. Pilon, of a more spontaneous and naturalistic manner (tomb of the chancellor de Birague; sepulcher of Henry III, at the Louvre).

In this period the French classical art is born which finds its highest expression in the 17th century.

Architecture in particular is dominated by Italianism, which informs the vast building renewal of the Paris of Henry IV. Churches crowned by the dome arise (church of the Sorbonne, of Val-de-Grâce, of the College of the Four Nations); palaces with gardens populated with statues (Marie de' Medici had the Luxembourg enlarged and transformed in imitation of the Pitti Palace, by S. de Brosse); and the Italian taste for the glorification of the lives of high personages by means of funerary statuary is born (Chantilly: tomb of Henry Condé by Sarrazin; at Moulins, tomb of Montmorency by F. Anguier). The invitation to Bernini to Paris (1665) to continue the construction of the Louvre is an indication of the orientation of taste toward Italian art; but at the same time, Bernini's failure is proof of it, the French classical art blossoms which makes use of Italian elements only as a reminiscence: F. Mansart (1598-1666) who imposed himself through his sense of proportion and sobriety (church of the Visitation; Vrilliere Palace; church of the Minims; design of Val-de-Grâce in Paris; Castle of Blois; Castle of Maisons), his great-nephew J. H. Mansart (1646-1708) who left his masterpiece in the small Trianon of Versailles; L. Le Vau (c. 1612-1670) who also traveled in Italy (Lambert Palace, Mazarin College in Paris; Castle of Vaux); A. Le Notre (1673-1700), one of the principal garden architects (his masterpiece the park of Versailles); Le Mercier; C. Perrault, who continued the construction of the Louvre, were the dominant personalities of this period. All left their mark on the Louvre and in the monument that marked the highest expression of the art and taste of that period, Versailles, where architecture, statues, gardens, fountains, abundance of water, all contribute to the composition of a sumptuous scenographic complex. The elements derived from Italian art are by now lived with an autonomous spirit that stamps French architecture with a particular characteristic: born from the encounter with the Italian Renaissance, it took from it grandeur but not intimate grandiosity; nobility but not monumentality (e.g., Perrault's colonnade at the Louvre). This character is also had by sculpture, which follows architecture, once again in a minor key. A. Coysevox (Duchess of Burgundy, 1712), Girardon (Bath of the nymphs), J. B. Lemoyne, J. B. Pigalle gradually free themselves from Italian motifs, down to E. Bouchardon who foreshadows Clodion.

VI. PAINTING IN THE 16TH CENTURY AND ITALIAN INFLUENCE

With the reign of Francis I the influence of Italian art entered painting as well. The French masters of this period looked to Moroni and Bronzino for the arrangement of the figures, felt in relation to characterization. The dominant personalities are Janet and François Clouet. By Janet (1475-1540) the portrait of Francis I (Paris, Petit Palais), a true glorification of sovereign dignity, the portrait of the Dauphin Francis (Museum of Antwerp), the Francis I of the Uffizi are works that set a school; likewise some by François: the portrait of Jean Babou, the signed and dated one of Pierre Quet (1562, Louvre), those of Francis of Lorraine, of Claude de Baune (also at the Louvre), of Elizabeth of Valois (Toledo). But it is from these very works that the decadence of the portrait is born, owing to the fact that it was felt as a "genre," and therefore bound to a formula that soon becomes fashion and rhetoric.

Contemporaneously with this official portraiture there arises the taste which, although generated directly by the influence of Italian artists, asserts itself with characteristics of originality and independence; it is that of the school of Fontainebleau, formed by the French artists who collaborated with Rosso and with Primaticcio and then with Niccolò dell'Abate on the decoration of the castle of Francis I. These mannerists brought into the French milieu the theoretical principles of the Italian Renaissance: anatomy, drawing, perspective, the treatises of Vitruvius, and naturally the knowledge of the classical world. The school of Fontainebleau is characterized by decorative richness and extreme affected elegance. The heroes of the classical world became delicately gallant and precious court figures; it is from this milieu that that aristocratic Epicureanism is born which will be found later in Boucher, Fragonard and even in Ingres. The major personality of the school of Fontainebleau was Jean Cousin (1490-1561). Primaticcio died in 1570 and Niccolò dell'Abate the following year; but the school of Fontainebleau had life and resonance until the early years of the 17th century, and its work was continued by the second school of Fontainebleau with Dubreuil (1561-1602), M. Fréminet (1567-1619), J. Cousin the younger (ca. 1522-92), A. Dubois (1543-1614), who decorated the Gallery of Diana at Fontainebleau (destroyed under the Empire). But by now the school, while preserving the taste for sumptuous decorations, had lost the delicate elegance and refinement and all spontaneity (e.g., Last Judgment by J. Cousin the younger, at the Louvre).

VII. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY AND CLASSICAL PAINTING

It is customary to call the classical age of French painting that of the renewal brought about by the great personalities through whom French painting assumes an autonomous physiognomy, independent of the taste of the Baroque triumphant in Italy and diffused in many European countries. The center in which this profound renewal converges is Paris, where the patronage of Louis XIII first and then of the court of the Sun King favors artistic production. But at the beginning of the century, the language of the school of Fontainebleau having been exhausted in a last weary echo, French painting is still dominated by Italian influence through the three painters who had the greatest credit: Valentin, Vignon, Vouet.

A Caravaggesque painter was Valentin (1591-1634), who from 1614 until his death lived in Rome (Concert, at the Petit Palais, Judith of the Museum of Toulouse, the Cardsharps of the Museum of Dresden which was even attributed to Caravaggio). Paris was dominated in this period by S. Vouet (1590-1649). His production was most abundant; he executed great decorative works (at the Louvre, at the Luxembourg, at the destroyed Hôtel-de-Bullions, etc.), many paintings for churches (Presentation in the Temple, at the Louvre; Martyrdom of St. Eustace, in the church of the same name in Paris; St. Charles Borromeo, at the Museum of Brussels) and portraits (Louis XIII with the symbolic figures of France and Navarre, at the Louvre). He had fluency of narration, virtuosity of pictorial effects, nobility of composition, but he never freed himself from academic exteriority.

Isolated artists, who left no school, were the brothers Antoine (1588-1648), Louis (1593-1615) and Mathieu (1607-ca. 1677) Le Nain, who ennobled, by spiritualizing it, the "bambocciata," the small picture of popular and humorous genre. Born in Lyon, hence from childhood in contact with Flemish art, the Le Nain probably worked in collaboration (in fact their works are signed with the surname alone). Nevertheless criticism has distinguished the three personalities, finding in Antoine a greater Flemish-leaning taste for narrative (Family Gathering, at the Petit Palais), in Louis a broad and vigorous manner (Peasant Family, at the Petit Palais), in Mathieu a more conventional mannerism (The Tric-Trac Players, at the Petit Palais). What surprises in the works of the Le Nain is the absolute immobility of the figures arrested — even in gestures of movement — in a calm, almost rarefied atmosphere.

The tradition of the portrait, reduced to constraint within now weary formal bounds, is renewed by F. de Champaigne (1602-74). Born and living in Brussels until the age of 19, he learned the taste for color from the Flemings; then he studied the Italians. These elements he recreated with a rigorous, austere personal style, while in the figure both physical and spiritual truth are brought out together, and in function of this truth costume and setting are also felt. Champaigne with his vast oeuvre (e.g., Louis XIII Crowned by Victory, the stupendous Richelieu, the Président de Mesme, the double portrait of Mother Superior Catherine Arnauld with Sister Catherine of St. Susanna, in which the psychological penetration is so subtle that the real is transfigured into the ideal) has marked the classical rebirth of French art. Classicism had another representative in Eustache Le Sueur (1617-55). After studying and copying Vouet he began to study Raphael through prints and drawings; from this he derived an academic manner, somewhat theatrical, an exteriority accentuated by the search for emotional effects that is only rarely corrected by a certain chasteness of drawing, by the perspectival arrangement and by the sobriety of color effects (Death of St. Bruno, Christ Carrying the Cross, Mass of St. Martin).

The highest expression of French art of this period is reached by two painters who worked and lived in Rome: Nicolas Poussin and Claude of Lorraine (v. LORENESS). They, substantially detaching themselves from contemporary Italian art, studied landscape and classical ruins and expressed this world, relived and recreated. The two masters exercised a decisive influence on French painting; it was felt not only by the artists of their time (besides those who worked in their orbit, Dughet and Patel), but also later, from David to Delacroix to Corot and Millet, French painting presupposes the experience of the two great masters.

VIII. THE ACADEMY

The age of Louis XIV is dominated by Charles Le Brun (1619-90) with his vast output and the founding of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture (1647). At the outset the Academy was intended to be merely a gathering of artists eager to perfect themselves through discussion and the study of problems of common interest, but unfortunately it ended up elaborating a doctrine, which was that of Le Brun, to which the others conformed. Le Brun, who had studied in Italy, drew from the works of Raphael and of the Bolognese painters a strong influence that is fundamental to his taste (Magdalen, Adoration of the Shepherds, Hunt of Meleager at the Louvre; great decorations at Versailles with allegories glorifying the reign of the Sun King; cartoons for tapestries). In the portraits, in which psychological investigation restrains the artist's facile exuberance, his style is more rigorous (Seguier, at the Louvre).

Le Brun dominated French painting for thirty years and found in the Academy ready collaborators and followers. Nevertheless, oppositions to the taste he disseminated were heard within the Academy itself. Important was the long polemic (1668-90) over the preeminence of drawing or of color, which set the followers of Le Brun against those of Rubens.

Pierre Mignard (1612-95) is not to be considered an opponent of Le Brun, because in reality he was only his personal enemy, while his artistic expression is akin to that of Le Brun, though without his vigor and the easygoing manner (Self-Portrait, the Dauphin with his family, Madame de Maintenon, in the Louvre); he is even more superficial in his large compositions (at Val-de-Grâce, at the Invalides). The two most significant painters of this period that closes the 17th century, H. Rigaud (1659-1743) and N. Largillière (1656-1746), drew their inspiration from Rubens and the Flemish painters. Rigaud's importance lies not so much in the dignity of the composition of the portrait, into which he also introduces the historical scene, as above all in his rendering of pictorial matter, which anticipates the delicacy and ease of 18th-century painting (cf. the splendid portraits of Louis XIV and Louis XV, in the Louvre, the Unknown Man of the Musée Carnavalet). Even more "modern" is Largillière's color, for the freshness and lightness of his touch and the preciousness of his tones, but his language is more superficial (Self-Portrait with his Wife and Daughter, in the Louvre; the Beautiful Strasbourgeoise in London, Meyer Sassoon collection).

A renovator of French taste and palette was A. Watteau (1684-1721), who relived and revolutionized every lesson drawn from the school of Rubens and from the study of Titian's works, forming for himself an absolutely independent and personal style.

Watteau's painting was of capital importance for the subsequent development of French art, but it had no immediate echo; rather than pupils he had imitators who learned his lesson only outwardly. Lancret (1690-1743), who was the most gifted, has a delicate sense of color, but his Fêtes galantes adapt Watteau's lyricism into a precious realism. The artists of the age of Louis XV had left to them only the great resource of their professional skill: sure technique, correctness of drawing, knowledge of the possibilities of color. These characteristics are common to numerous artists who do not rise above mediocrity: Nattier himself (1685-1766), with his society portraits of the court (Stockholm Museum: The Duchess of Chartres as Hebe), repeats with delicate chromatic virtuosity one and the same formula grown cold, which nevertheless maintains a tone of spontaneous freshness in the painting of F. Boucher (1703-70), which likewise had a great influence on French taste. His only great pupil was J. H. Fragonard (1734-1886), who to the teachings of the master joined those derived from his stay in Rome, where he studied Pietro da Cortona in depth.

The year 1737 is an important date in the history of French painting: it is that of the institution of the Salons. Figurative art comes into direct contact with the public, in which the taste for works of art spreads; and from the Salons the fame of artists now emerges: Chardin, Greuze, Fragonard himself, Vernet. J. B. S. Chardin (1699-1769) is of particular interest for the modern spirit with which he drew inspiration from subjects of domestic intimacy: his world is the modest and simple one of his own house. The danger of falling into rhetoric, into the genre scene, is overcome by the purity of his style. The emotion evoked by his pictorial world is, rather than expressed, suggested by the sober and keen drawing itself and by the pure color, modulated in delicate tonalities with a light touch. J. Vernet (1714-70) renders the sky and the light of his landscapes with a delicacy of tone that preludes Corot. But before the sense of color could mature into its highest solutions, French art had to pass through an experience that involved all of Europe: Neoclassicism.

IX. NEOCLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE AND SCULPTURE

In the full 18th century, while the Baroque had enjoyed little fortune and the Rococo (v.) even less, being limited to interior decorations and furniture, the taste for ancient classical art matured (v. NEOCLASSICAL ART). Architecture immediately adhered to the new taste, but precisely because of the ease of finding immediate models it was unable to derive from the grandiose purity of classical forms the expression of an intimate monumentality. The Pantheon in Paris, by G. Soufflot (1705-80), obviously inspired by the Pantheon in Rome, marks the beginning of a whole series of monuments of this kind. It was above all the Napoleonic age that centralized, especially in Paris, the triumph of Neoclassicism. The most remarkable personality was Chalgrin (1739-1811), who drew new ideas from the elaboration of classical monuments (Paris, Arc de l'Etoile). But other architects such as Vignon (church of the Madeleine), Brogniat (the Bourse), Bélanger, and even Percier and Fontaine themselves, Napoleon's official architects (Arc du Carrousel), produced work that was a stale copy of classical motifs, without animating them with autonomous life. The most important phenomenon of the Neoclassical age was the rise of urban planning problems, whose first realization came with the Place de la Concorde in Paris (1757) by J. Gabriel. He was also the architect of the Château de Compiègne and of the theater of Versailles (1770). The Neoclassical infatuation scarcely touched religious architecture, which fell back on the imitation of basilical schemes.

Sculpture, soon dominated by the Italian influence of Canova, had its most remarkable personality in H. Houdon (1741-1828), whose numerous busts, inspired by Roman portraiture, and whose statues on subjects are enlivened with fine sensitivity (Petit Palais: Voltaire; The Flayed Man; Giordano Bruno; Rome, church of S. Maria degli Angeli: St. Bruno). Among the sculptors who worked in his orbit (A. Pajou: busts of Descartes, of Bossuet, of Pascal; F. Leconte; David d'Angers: pediment of the Pantheon) emerged Clodion (1738-1814), who especially in small bronzes, in terracottas or in vibrant bas-reliefs surpassed conventionality with a lively freshness of modeling (Louvre: Cleopatra).

X. NEOCLASSICAL AND CLASSICAL PAINTING

French Neoclassicism found its most important expression — also because of the repercussions it had on European art — in painting dominated by J. L. David (v.). The influence exerted by David was enormous; from his school came A. Gros (exalter of the Napoleonic epic), Girodet, Gérard (typical representatives of the "Empire" taste), while the Neoclassical creed spread throughout Europe. The first oppositions to the predominance of David's taste arose in his own studio, where J. A. Ingres (v.) rose to assert pictorial freedom against all programmatic constraint.

XI. ROMANTICISM

1. Painting

The true reaction to neoclassicism and at the same time to classicism was the one that established itself under the name of Romanticism. The Raft of the Medusa (Louvre), which J. L. A. Géricault (1791-1824) exhibited at the Salon of 1819, seemed to launch the program of the new movement. The subject, derived from the dramatic detail of a shipwreck that stirred public opinion, is rendered with a painting so rich in effects of pure color and with such power of style that they raise realism from a human plane to a heroic meaning. But it was a man of letters, Baudelaire, who first critically examined the work of the most significant personality of the Romantic movement, Delacroix (v.), and in a celebrated essay (L'oeuvre et la vie d'Eugène Delacroix) synthesized Romantic aesthetics: the freedom of the artist's imagination and the spirituality of art.

Outside the Romantic milieu, but also far in spirit from that of the so-called realists, is the work of H. Daumier (1808-79), who, turning his attention to everyday life, brings out the sorrows, vices or weaknesses of humanity by capturing the nuances of a gesture or an attitude. Reality is ironically transfigured and every element is deformed for the revelation of the true meaning of his subjects.

2. Architecture and sculpture

Romanticism had no original architectural expression. The taste for the Middle Ages, which had led to a critical revaluation of the Gothic (in 1823 the «Société des antiquaires de Normandie» had been founded and in 1837 the «Commission des monuments gothiques»), resolved itself in practice into the banal imitation of those monuments. A typically representative architect of this taste is Viollet-le-Duc (1814-79), who devoted himself especially to the restoration of the great cathedrals and castles. Unfortunately these restorations often resolved themselves into wholesale rebuildings that, leveling architecture to formal schemas, destroyed its artistic truth (e.g., the Castle of Pierrefonds). The imitation of the Romanesque and the Gothic was followed by that of the Byzantine and the Renaissance, and the elements of those different expressive languages were employed with continual contamination. From this derived an eclectic taste that, moreover - apart from local characteristics - was common to all of Europe for fifty years. From this taste Paris acquired a new face, which is the one that still characterizes it today, through the implementation of a complete and organic master plan designed by G. E. Haussmann, prefect under Napoleon III. The architecture, pompous and overloaded, was nevertheless marked by a particular taste of its own and had its major monuments in the Opera by C. Garnier (1861) and the New Louvre by Lefuel (1852-57).

Sculpture followed painting in a minor key. The greatest personality in the Romantic milieu was F. Rude, whose most representative work is the great bas-relief of the Arc de l'Etoile (Paris, 1833-56), The Departure of the Volunteers of 1792, executed with such fresh enthusiasm as to justify the popular name of «la Marseillaise». Barye, passionate about the painting of Géricault, ennobles his bronzes of animals with profound emotionality. A profound influence of Rude was felt in his beginnings by J. B. Carpeaux (1827-75), who later turned to veristic investigations.

XII. FROM ROMANTICISM TO IMPRESSIONISM

Romanticism reached exhaustion toward the middle of the 19th century. The year 1848 is usually taken as the boundary between Romanticism and the new taste: it is obvious that such a division is conventional, but it is undeniable that from that year of profound upheavals throughout Europe life emerged changed; the new social ideologies attracted the attention of artists. The historical subject, the exaltation of the Napoleonic era or the rhetoric of literary inspiration were replaced by the humanity of workers and peasants, of humble people; contemporary life took the place of the life evoked from the past. Thus was born realism, which took its start from G. Courbet (1819-77), triumphant at the Salon of 1850 with the Burial at Ornans. Courbet's style, characterized by excellent qualities of drawing, a taste for beautiful pictorial matter, for color that is modulated in delicate variations of tone and in brilliant effects of light (Paris, Jeu-de-Paume: The Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine; The Stone Breakers; The Studio) set a school; but very soon literary rhetoric was replaced by demagogic rhetoric. A place apart in realism belongs to J. F. Millet (1814-75): in themes drawn from daily life he brings a patient and meditated analysis that translates into a monumental static quality (Paris, Jeu-de-Paume: The Harvesters). But his minute examination and psychological research sometimes lead him to sentimental effects (The Angelus; The Shepherdess).

In the midst of realism, a group of artists centered around Th. Rousseau (1812-67) worked with a Romantic spirit and reconquering pictorial taste, in what was called the Barbizon school. These painters devoted themselves exclusively to the landscape, which they wished to renew from the formulas of the Anglo-Dutch and French Neoclassical tradition.

Neither to Romanticism nor to realism does the work of the great personality of C. Corot (v.) belong. His painting, through its subjective and rapidly fixed vision of the mobility of things, foreshadows the movement that broke all points of contact with tradition and from which modern art was born: Impressionism (v.).

XIII. FROM IMPRESSIONISM TO CONTEMPORARY PAINTING

The movement, which originally welcomed a small group of independent artists who exhibited outside the official Salons, derived its name from a painting by Monet, Impressioni; but the work that clamorously proclaimed the new artistic creed was Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe, exhibited at the Salon des refusés of 1865. A revolutionary work not only in the choice of subject, but in the "painting" that no longer respected traditional canons: the separations of colors are sharp, without intermediate transitions and without chiaroscuro. Above the requirements of perspective, of modeling and of composition and of all the elements of reality, the only law is that of color. Alongside Manet, and following the same principles, other painters emerge with their own independent personality: Degas insists on the psychological examination of his subjects with attentive and meticulous care; Monet transforms light into pure pictorial essence; alongside him Sisley and Pissarro carry luminism to those extreme consequences that would mature into divisionism; and Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) achieves a synthesis between decoration and illustration. But already in those years (1883-90) the crisis of Impressionism was maturing: artists of the same Impressionist group broke away from it, arriving at results different from its premises: Renoir, who achieved marvelous effects of open air, of solar luminosity, and restored to favor the study of the figure, and Cézanne, who brought color to fix nature in a plastic, motionless and geometric reality (The Card Players at the Jeu-de-Paume; the numerous landscapes and still lifes). His volumetric world was the starting point for cubism (v.).

The first complete reaction to Impressionism was that of P. Gauguin (1848-1903). The foundation of his artistic creed is what he said of himself: «je ne suis pas un peintre d'après nature; tout chez moi se passe en ma folle imagination». From his very first works he rejected Impressionism's fragmentation of color and the consequent dissolution of form, seeking instead the conquest of formal solidity by means of large surfaces of color set off by a dark outline.

V. Van Gogh (1853-90), with his shattered form and his hard, dazzling brushstroke, opens the way to Expressionism.

Thus, even before the end of the century, Impressionism exhausted itself, and with it its closest derivatives: the divisionism (v.) of Seurat (1859-91), based on the possibilities of color vibrations through the juxtaposition of complementary colors, and the «pointillisme», or Neo-Impressionism of Signac. From Van Gogh's renewal started Matisse, who, wishing to free himself completely from fidelity to the objective datum, moved toward a marked simplification of forms that live by the sharp contrast of violent flat tints: from this was born «fauvisme», so called for the vehemence of its simplification and the enthusiasm - which generated a vast current of taste - for Negro art, which forced itself upon attention with the Salon of 1905 (Derain, Vlaminck, Marquet, Dufy), an affirmation of «fauvisme» and of artistic personalities of our own day. From the Fauvist demand for «pure painting» originated the cubism of Braque, which on the other hand finds its foundation in Cézanne's geometric faith: «traiter la nature par le cylindre, la sphère, le cône». The cubism of Utrillo has a particular aspect, resolved into a highly personal poetics «d'instinct». From the principle of cubism expressed by Apollinaire - that the subject does not matter, or, if it matters, it is for the occasional suggestions of form and color that it can give - came the extreme consequence of pure painting, that which, under the conventional name of abstractionism, is still at the heart of contemporary polemic. Its essence is indicated by the personality who is still its most representative figure, Picasso: «comme la peinture possède sa beauté propre, on peut créer une beauté abstraite pour qu'elle demeure picturale». Alongside abstractionism are the Expressionism of Rouault, who in the violent exaltation of color lyricizes human feeling; and the «fantastic» art of Chagall; this opened the way to Surrealism (v.), which seeks, by as many paths as there are personalities, to give artistic expression to the world of the subconscious, to pure thought (Tanguy; Dali).

XIV. ARCHITECTURE AND SCULPTURE FROM THE MID-19TH CENTURY

Impressionism, which by its nature was a pictorial movement, did not find a corresponding revolution in the field of architecture. The attempts of the Halles of Paris (v. Baltard, 1851-59) and of the Eiffel Tower (1889) remain in the field of engineering, and therefore of pure technique, and not of architecture (that is, of art), in which the renewal of the building material - iron - is not followed by the renewal of the artistic language. Nor did the stripping away of ornamentation derived, shortly afterward, from the use of concrete attain rigor of style. The new architectural solutions that matured

(from L. II, Labande, Les primitifs français, II, Marseille 1838)
FRANCE. - St. John the Evangelist at Ephesus. Provençal panel (15th cent.) - Marseille, Bernard collection.

in Holland, in Sweden, in Germany, found in France an original expression only when, starting from Cubist theories, Le Corbusier realized his architectural purism.

Sculpture adhered to the Impressionist taste with A. Rodin (1840-1917). His style is already clearly expressed in the work with which he established himself: The Man with the Broken Nose (1864; Paris, Rodin Museum), in which realism is surpassed by the sense of drama suggested by a pictorial chiaroscuro, which nevertheless does not sacrifice plastic energy.

Fundamental to the overcoming of Impressionism in sculpture as well was the work of Renoir (he devoted himself to it late, after 1890), who brought about a sense of the solidification of form. And immediately afterward it was his own pupils who broke away from that taste. Bourdelle (1861-1929) sought the beauty and monumentality of archaic art, but beneath this deliberate formal simplification academicism sometimes surfaces. A. Maillol achieves a more spontaneous monumentality, with broad masses balanced by a calm and composed rhythm. Contemporary French sculpture is still influenced by his style. So much so that those expressions adhering to current trends in painting, from Cubism to Expressionism to Abstractionism, may appear sporadic manifestations (when it was not the painters themselves, such as Matisse and Picasso, who modeled sculptures): R. Duchamp-Villon, H. Laurens, and Derain himself, for example, carry the Picassian gospel into sculpture. In reality, from Impressionism onward French art has played a role of world importance, but it is with painting that it has fulfilled every requirement of artistic becoming.

Elsa Gerlini

Without wishing to go back to the Concordat of 1516 and without speaking of the revolutionary crisis of 1789, it is nevertheless necessary to recall briefly the official union that had been established between Church and State with the Concordat of 1801, the Organic Articles and the imperial legislation. Despite numerous incidents, the Concordat gave the Church a relative peace for 80 years. But from 1880 onward, it gradually lost its advantages. Moreover, with the law on associations of 1 July 1901, which decreed the dissolution of the Congregations, the controversy over the formula for appointing bishops, the law of 7 July 1904 suppressing congregational teaching, and the recall of the French ambassador to the Holy See, despite the continued existence of the Concordat, the separation was in fact accomplished.

It was decided in law by the law of 9 Dec. 1905. Art. 2 laid down the principle that "the Republic recognizes no worship." But if the Republic recognized no religion, it nevertheless guaranteed freedom of conscience: the law declared that it guaranteed the free exercise of worship. Ecclesiastical property was to be transferred to the associations that would be legally formed in conformity with the general rules of organization of worship. Such were the essential principles of the law of separation. The Church was free, but impoverished and threatened with total spoliation if it did not constitute the prescribed associations. Now, such associations threatened the constitutional order of the Church.

The principles laid down by the law of 1905 were also condemned by Rome. On 11 Feb. 1906 the encyclical Vehementer Nos protested against the rupture of the Concordat and demonstrated the incompatibility between the "cultual associations" and the Church. On 10 Aug. 1906 the encyclical Gravissimo officii condemned any formula of cultural association. In the face of the Church's resistance, a new law intervened, of 2 Jan. 1907, which left the sacred buildings at the disposal of Catholics and granted their free use not only to the cultual associations but also to those under common law and to ministers of worship. New difficulties appeared, and the Council of State, the sovereign judge of administrative questions, had to resolve all the problems. Under its influence relations between Church and State were transformed, from declared hostility, gradually into a tacit agreement. If one wishes to summarize in a few words the whole period from 1801 to our own day, one must take up Prof. Le Bras's formula: we have passed from concordats to separation and from separation to concord.

The liberal evolution of the regime is characterized by a reconciliation between Church and State and by an understanding between the two authorities. This reconciliation dates from the resumption of diplomatic relations with the Vatican. An ambassador was appointed on 21 May 1921. The French representatives in Rome sought to obtain the removal of the interdict pronounced by Pius X against the cultual associations. A commission of French jurists approved the draft statutes of diocesan associations that were not contrary to French legislation and were at the same time in conformity with the constitution of the Catholic Church. The encyclical Maximum gravissimumque of 18 Jan. 1921 authorized their constitution. These are the principal stages of the reconciliation. But the understanding that has been established is the fruit of the decisions taken by the Council of State, of which it may well be said that it has been and is "the regulator of parish life."

Whether it is a matter of religious buildings or of the situation of ministers of worship or of the organization of ceremonies, it is the Council of State that has permitted the liberal evolution of the public spirit. To the parish churches, which the law of 2 Jan. 1907 had declared to be destined for the exercise of worship, the Council of State added the chapels, the religious monuments, which escape any influence of civil power. No alienation of a building may occur without a legislative decree; no demolition except in case of imminent danger; no modification of the places. The law of 13 Apr. 1908 permits the State, the departments and the communes to assume the expenses necessary for the maintenance and conservation of buildings of worship. In the very important decree "Canonico Vaucanu," of 26 Oct. 1946, the Council of State imposes on the communes the obligation to accept the participation of the faithful in the repair of the Church. If the commune refuses, it will bear the consequences of this refusal.

As regards ministers of worship, the Council of State subordinates the faithful to the pastor. It recognizes as pastor only the one accredited by the bishop. In questions between the priest sent by a cultural association and the priest in communion with Rome, it has always considered the latter as the only legitimate one. Thus, the organic unity of Catholicism is assured. The Council of State has also permitted collections in the churches. It has permitted the communes to grant a stipend to the curates as guardians of the church.

As for the external manifestations of worship and in particular processions, the Council of State has sought to reconcile respect for freedom of worship with the maintenance of public order. Since 1926, the case law of the Council of State has become vigorous and consistent both for processions and for small parades. Any prohibition of a traditional parade is annulled provided it is not justified by public order. The Council of State authorizes priests to carry the Viaticum "under the conditions consecrated by local habits and traditions." But it shows itself severe regarding prohibitions against public Masses. By decree of 5 March 1948 it judged illegal a prohibition imposed by a prefect when neither public tranquility nor public safety were threatened. The law of 1905 declared that the Republic recognized no worship, but also that the Republic guaranteed freedom of conscience. The Council of State has sought to apply this principle in the same way in which it has accepted scrupulous respect for canon law. Persons, things, sacred acts — it accepts all the definitions and prescriptions of the medieval Corpus and of the code that replaced it in 1918. This acceptance of canon law is exact at least for the exercise of freedom of conscience, which presupposes for the one who professes the Catholic religion the adoption of all the rules of the Roman Church.

Pasquale Arrighi

VI. SCHOOL SYSTEM.

Talleyrand proposed in the year 1790 the institution in every commune of an elementary school and in every district of a lycée; Condorcet reorganized in the years 1806-1808 all the schools, adhering to the maxim that the right to educate the people belongs solely to the State; Guizot established in the year 1833 in every department a seminary for teachers; Falloux recognized in the year 1850 that the Catholic Church also has the right to teach. This right was annulled in the year 1882 by Jules Ferry, who declared that instruction must be considered as the foundation of the Republic and as such must be obligatory, free, gratuitous and non-denominational.

Lay morality was to take the place of religious instruction, which was thus moved into the churches, where it was imparted on Thursdays, declared days of vacation.

The Church instituted family councils, which were given the task of seeing to it that the religious sentiment of their children was not offended in the non-denominational school, inasmuch as J. Ferry's law gave the right of complaint on the part of family councils against offenses to religious sentiment.

Combes and Briand achieved in the years 1904-1905 the complete exclusion of the clergy from the schools, the suspension of any form of subsidy on the part of the State to private schools, including Catholic ones, and the prohibition of private schools, including Catholic ones, in the provinces of Alsace-Lorraine. The encyclical Maximum gravissimumque brought a certain relaxation in the school field and the year 1920 marked a revival of Catholic schools. The ministerial decree of 15 Apr. 1948 emphasizes professional education. The French school system comprises 2,869 écoles maternelles, 68,015 écoles primaires inférieures and écoles primaires supérieures, 198 écoles d'enseignement secondaire, divided into lycées and collèges, 195 écoles normales, écoles pratiques de commerce et d'industrie and various normal and evening professional schools. The universities are the following: Montpellier (1125), Paris (1150), Angers (1220), Toulouse (1230), Gray (1287), Orléans (1260), Avignon (1303), Cahors (1332), Grenoble (1339), Orange (1365), Aix (1400), Dôle (1422), Poitiers (1431), Nantes (1460), Bourges (1464), Caen (1421-72), Perpignan (1349), Valence (1459), Bordeaux (1441), Besançon (1485), Douai (1530), Lille (1530), Nancy (1572), Pont-à-Mousson (1572), Reims (1550), Pau (1722), Rennes (1735), Dijon (1772), Lyon (1808) and Clermont-Ferrand (1808).

As for freedom of teaching, the Constituent Assembly, on 9 Aug. 1946, refused to regulate it in the preamble of the Constitution. It is therefore no longer one of the principles of the new Constitution of 1946, and, if one cannot say it is abolished, it nevertheless remains only within the sphere of ordinary laws. Naturally the bishops have protested and acted through committees and memorials. A deliberation of the Council of State of 3 June 1949 and a decree established on a deliberation of the same (13 Apr. 1950), provide that monetary aid also be distributed to the pupils of private schools; and that these must be able to have the same advantages as the pupils of public schools. For the protection and defense of free teaching the ecclesiastical hierarchy has given rise to various auxiliary associations and unions, e.g., the Fédération des amicales des parents d'élèves de l'enseignement catholique de France; the Alliance des associations d'éducation catholiques; the Syndicat des chefs d'établissements d'enseignement libre, etc.

French Catholics maintain at their own expense numerous schools of every grade and universities: the Institut catholique in Paris and the Universities of Angers (1875), Lille (1875), Lyon (1875) and Toulouse.

The education of the Catholic clergy takes place in 37 preparatory schools, in 132 minor seminaries, in 34 colleges, in 96 major seminaries and in 3 seminaries called Seminaria plena. - See plates CVII-CXI.

Stumpf Miroslav