The Seigneurs of Old Canada : A Chronicle of New World Feudalism
- Pages
- about 113
- Category
- History
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 2.1 h at 250 wpm
From the opening
What would history be without the picturesque annals of
the Gallic race? This is a question which the serious
student may well ask himself as he works his way through
the chronicles of a dozen centuries. From the age of
Charlemagne to the last of the Bonapartes is a long stride
down the ages; but there was never a time in all these
years when men might make reckonings in the arithmetic
of European politics without taking into account the
prestige, the power, and even the primacy of France.
There were times without number when France among her
neighbours made herself hated with an undying hate; there
were times, again, when she rallied them to her side in
friendship and admiration. There were epochs in which
her hegemony passed unquestioned among men of other lands,
and there were times when a sudden shift in fortune seemed
to lay the nation prostrate, with none so poor to do her
reverence.
It was France that first brought an orderly nationalism
out of feudal chaos; it was her royal house of Capet that
rallied Europe to the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre and
led the greatest of the crusades to Palestine. Yet the
France of the last crusades was within a century the
France of Crecy, just as the France of Austerlitz was
more speedily the France of Waterloo; and men who followed
the tricolour at Solferino lived to see it furled in
humiliation at Sedan. No other country has had a history
as prolific in triumph and reverse, in epochs of peaceful
progress and periods of civil commotion, in pageant and
tragedy, in all that gives fascination to historical
narrative. Happy the land whose annals are tiresome! Not
such has been the fortune of poor old France.
The sage Tocqueville has somewhere remarked that whether
France was loved or hated by the outside world she could
not be ignored. That is very true. The Gaul has at all
stages of his national history defied an attitude of
indifference in others.
A short sample. Read the whole book
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