Link to Chronology
French civilization
A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War
Book Seven
The Hegemony of the Papacy and of France in the Thirteenth Century
Chapter III
France
1. France and European Politics
There follows a fairly lengthy description of how Louis VIII came to incorporate Languedoc/Midi/Provence/
County of Toulouse (am I forgetting a term?) into the area of France he controlled using the Crusade against the Cathars as his justification. By the end of 1226 this bloody process was complete.
This was followed by the Regency and then reign of St Louis (Louis IX, 1226-1270). St Louis managed to settle accounts with Henry III of England in the Treaty of Albeville (1259), and with Jaime II of Aragon in the Treaty of Corbeil (1258). St Louis then died while pursuing a disastrous policy of Crusades (1248-1254, and 1270). St Louis's final Crusade was also linked to the competition between Charles of Anjou and Pedro of Aragon for control of Sicily (see Battle of Benevento in 1266, "the Sicilian Vespers" in 1282. All of which ended in 1285 with there being two Kingdoms of Sicily, one on either side of the Strait of Messina, one belonging to the house of Aragon and the other to the Angevin dynasty).
p345 ...Since the Treaty of Corbeil the Pyrenees had delimited political rights as definitively as they divided the adjacent countries. One may ask why Philip the Bold [successor to St Louis] should have resolved once more to unsettle so satisfactory an arrangement and to meddle in Spanish affairs. No danger threatened him from beyond the mountains, and there was no question of claiming any rights or protecting any interests. The dynastic problems which had occasioned his intervention in Navarre and Castile since 1275 were merely pretexts. He made use of these pretexts because he wanted to make war: the sort of war that in the days of Louis XIV was described as a war of magnificence, and which we should call a war of hegemony. Having the power, he made use of it to enforce his will, with no other object in view than the glory of his crown. This, I believe, was the first war of pure political ambition to be recorded by the history of Europe... [I think he means since the fall of Rome. Actually, I'm not sure what he means. This reminds me of Athens's war against Syracuse and the recent U.S. war against Iraq.] After the Sicilian Vespers the Pope, having excommunicated the King of Aragon, offered his kingdom, which was a fief of the Church, to the King of France, for one of his sons. Philip's choice fell on Charles de Valois, and he crossed the Pyrenees in order to win for him the throne of Pedro II. He did not succeed... for he died during the campaign.
p346 What St Louis had achieved was completely ruined. His son, at his death, left France involved in the affairs of Italy and Spain, while England... was on the point of once more taking up arms against her... Yet if the position of France was not so stable as it had been twenty years earlier, it was more brilliant... In the Europe of the 13th century France had no rival...
Here is a great video that covers the conflict between France and England through Crecy. I think it was the legacy of the Battle of Crecy that trained the English to expect their afterthought army to always discover a genius commander and to overcome against all odds. What is amazing is how often this actually happened -- until the 20th century, when they had to pretend it was still happening. Though, to be fair, even in 1914 their BEF army was probably qualitatively superior to any other army of the nations engaged... it was just too small -- in an age of national, conscripted armies -- to be decisive. Maybe the English only excel when they are fighting the French.
2. French Civilization
A love note to France in which she is revealed to be the new Attica.
p347 ...France, in the 13th century, had the good fortune to be superior to the rest of Europe both as a State and as a society...
If we observe the general state of European civilization after the Carolingian period, we see that nearly all of its essential characteristics made their appearance in France earlier than elsewhere, and also that it was in France that they achieved their most perfect expression. This applies to religion as well as to secular life. The Order of Cluny, the Order of the Cistercians, and the Order of the Premonstrants had their birth in France; the Order of Chivalry was a French creation, and it was from France that the Crusades obtained their most numerous and most enthusiastic recruits. it was in France, too, at the beginning of the 12th century, that Gothic art suddenly rose as from the soil and imposed its supremacy on the world, and in France the first chansons de geste made their appearance... That so many eminent personalities should have existed in one country, that the basin of the Seine, from the 10th century onwards, should have been the scene of so many achievements and so many innovations, means that there must have existed there, as in Greece, in the Attica of the 5th century, an environment which was peculiarly favorable to the manifestations of human energy. And it is a fact that the two great social forces which operated... to constitute a new Europe -- the monastic and the feudal system -- were nowhere so active and so predominant as in Northern France... Hence the extraordinary enthusiasm of the Frenchmen of the North for the Crusades: that is, for the completest imaginable manifestation of a society which was dominated at once by the religious and the military spirit... [the creation of a "literature in the vulgar tongue" is also mentioned.]
p348 Thus the ascendancy of French civilization long antedated the ascendancy of the French monarchy... It would be perfectly accurate to say that both civilization and politics had a feudal character when they first made their appearance in France... [The founders of the great monasteries in Burgundy, Flanders, and Champagne, as well as the heroes of the chansons de geste,] ... were feudal barons, and the virtues which the chansons extolled were courage, fidelity and piety... During the course of the 12th century this feudal civilization embellished and purified itself. The life of the court, with its refined and conventional manners, which the Middle Ages very exactly describe as "courteous manners," was first developed, not in the entourage of the king... but in the princely residences. It was there that the rules and the ceremonial of chivalry were established, there that the sentiment of honor had its birth; there the worship of womanhood first made its appearance; and there a literature developed to which Rome and Brittany contributed motives... while the various lyric forms of the langue d'oc made their way into the langue d'oil... At the close of the 11th century ["this blossoming of feudal life"] made its appearance in England, with the companions of the Conqueror... French was the language spoken in Jerusalem, Antioch, and Saint-Jean d'Acre. From that time until our own days French as been the international language of Europeans in the basin of the Eastern Mediterranean. [Again, like classical Greek.]
...
p350 The comparison [between the use of the French language and the spread of French culture at this time, with the similar position of Greece in the final centuries BCE] is all the more exact inasmuch as, in the case of France as in that of Greece, it applies to art as well as to manners and literature. We have only to consider the conquest of Europe by Gothic architecture, for this epithet of "Gothic," which it owes to the disdain of the Italian humanists, was applied, as we know, to an essentially French creation. The invention of the pointed arch, at the beginning of the 12th century, somewhere on the confines of Normandy and the Ile de France, had the effect, in a few years... of completely transforming the fundamental structure and the style of architectural monuments.... from this transformation was born the one great school of architecture which the history of art can place on an equality with Greek architecture... The cathedrals of France may be inferior to those of other countries in respect of size, imaginative decoration, and luxuriance or resplendent materials, but in their harmony and their majesty they are incomparable: they are the Parthenons of Gothic.
I love the way he structured this argument.
p351 ...All the knowledge of the Middle Ages, if we make some exception in the case of law and medicine, was ecclesiastical... It was essentially universal and international. And yet its central point, its focus, was in France; or to be exact, in Paris. The two cardinal sciences of the epoch... theology and philosophy -- seem to have chosen, from the 12th century onwards, to make their home on the banks of the Seine. It was there that the scholastic method was evolved, which until he Renaissance dominated human thought as completely as the Gothic style had dominated art... From Abelard to Gerson there was not a single thinker of any mark who did not either teach or study in Paris. The University, which had been created in the reign of Philip Augustus by the amalgamation of the masters and scholars of the various schools of Paris, exercised its irresistible and unexampled power of attraction to the very limits of the Catholic world... And the universal ascendancy exercised by Paris was matched... by the cosmopolitanism of the masters who taught in the University. They came not only from France, but also from Germany (Albertus Magnus), the Low Countries (Sugar of Brabant), Scotland (Duns Scotus), and Italy (Thomas Aquinas)... just as Rome was the headquarters of the government of the Church, Paris was the seat of its theological and philosophical activities...
He then argues that this scholastic development took place in Paris, and not in the courts of the feudal magnates, because Paris was the seat of the royal court which was not interested in the "mystical foundations of the Church" that were favored by the princes.
p353 The influence of French civilization in the 12th and 13th centuries was not everywhere felt with equal intensity... Elsewhere [than England and the Crusader communities of the East] it was introduced as a borrowed thing; it was imitated... But everywhere this influence was communicated only to the upper classes of society; to the nobles, in lay circles, and to the students and scholars among the clergy. In this respect it may be compared with the influence of the Renaissance in the 15th century; like the latter, it affected only the social aristocracy, or the aristocracy of intellect and learning... The France of the Middle Ages had not so far developed her economic life that she was able to propagate her influence by means of commerce and industry. In this domain she was far behind Italy and Flanders. Nevertheless, in Flanders... the influence of French civilization affected even the bourgeoisie. The patricians of the great Flemish cities of the 12th century were more than half French; even employing French as their administrative language, and in business.
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