who did not count for much, but who reacted against the insufficient protection of the regular institutions by a voluntary subordination to certain powerful chiefs.
This impotence of the state was a permanent cause of those discords and revolts, which in the 1st century B.C. were so singularly favourable to Caesar’s ambition. Thus after eight years of incoherent struggles, of scattered revolts, and then of more and more energetic efforts, Caesar in Gaul. Gaul, at last aroused by Vercingetorix, for once concentrated her strength, only to perish at Alesia, vanquished by Roman discipline and struck at from the rear by the conquest of Britain (58–50 B.C.).
This defeat completely altered the destiny of Gaul, and she became one of the principal centres of Roman civilization. Of the vast Celtic empire which had dominated Europe nothing now remained but scattered remnants in the farthest corners of the land, refuges for all Roman Gaul. the vanquished Gaels, Picts or Gauls; and of its civilization there lingered only idioms and dialects—Gaelic, Pict and Gallic—which gradually dropped out of use. During five centuries Gaul was unfalteringly loyal to her conquerors; for to conquer is nothing if the conquered be not assimilated by the conqueror, and Rome was a past-mistress of this art. The personal charm of Caesar and the prestige of Rome are not of themselves sufficient to explain this double conquest. The generous and enlightened policy of the imperial administration asked nothing of the people of Gaul but military service and the payment of the tax; in return it freed individuals from patronal domination, the people from oligarchic greed or Druidic excommunication, and every one in general from material anxiety. Petty tyrannies gave place to the great Pax Romana. The Julio-Claudian dynasty did much to attach the Gauls to the empire; they always occupied the first place in the mind of Augustus, and the revolt of the Aeduan Julius Sacrovir, provoked by the census of A.D. 21, was easily repressed by Tiberius. Caligula visited Gaul and founded literary competitions at Lyons, which had become the political and intellectual capital of the country. Claudius, who was a native of Lyons, extended the right of Roman citizenship to many of his fellow-townsmen, gave them access to the magistracy and to the senate, and supplemented the annexation of Gaul by that of Britain. The speech which he pronounced on this occasion was engraved on tables of bronze at Lyons, and is the first authentic record of Gaul’s admission to the citizenship of Rome. Though the crimes of Nero and the catastrophes which resulted from his downfall, provoked the troubles of the year A.D. 70, the revolt of Sabinus was in the main an attempt by the Germans to pillage Gaul and the prelude to military insurrections. The government of the Flavians and the Antonines completed a definite reconciliation. After the extinction of the family of Augustus in the 1st century Gaul had made many emperors—Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian and Domitian; and in the 2nd century she provided Gauls to rule the empire—Antoninus (138–161) came from Nîmes and Claudius from Lyons, as did also Caracalla later on (211–217).
The romanization of the Gauls, like that of the other subject nations, was effected by slow stages and by very diverse means, furnishing an example of the constant adaptability of Roman policy. It was begun by establishing a network of roads with Lyons as the central point, Material and political transformation of Roman Gaul. and by the development of a prosperous urban life in the increasingly wealthy Roman colonies; and it was continued by the disintegration into independent cities of nearly all the Gaulish states of the Narbonnaise, together with the substitution of the Roman collegial magistracy for the isolated magistracy of the Gauls. This alteration came about more quickly in the north-east in the Rhine-land than in the west and the centre, owing to the near neighbourhood of the legions on the frontiers. Rome was too tolerant to impose her own institutions by force; it was the conquered peoples who collectively and individually solicited as a favour the right of adopting the municipal system, the magistracy, the sacerdotal and aristocratic social system of their conquerors. The edict of Caracalla, at the beginning of the 3rd century, by conferring the right of citizenship on all the inhabitants of the empire, completed an assimilation for which commercial relations, schools, a taste for officialism, and the adaptability and quick intelligence of the race had already made preparation. The Gauls now called themselves Romans and their language Romance. There was neither oppression on the one hand nor servility on the other to explain this abandonment of their traditions. Thanks to the political and religious unity which a common worship of the emperor and of Rome gave them, thanks to administrative centralization tempered by a certain amount of municipal autonomy, Gaul prospered throughout three centuries.
But this stability of the Roman peace had barely been realized
when events began to threaten it both from within and without.
The Pax Romana having rendered any armed force
unnecessary amid a formerly very bellicose people, only
eight legions mounted guard over the Rhine to protect
Decline of the imperial authority
in Gaul.
it from the barbarians who surrounded the empire.
The raids made by the Germans on the eastern frontiers,
the incessant competitions for the imperial power, and the
repeated revolts of the Pretorian guard, gradually undermined
the internal cohesion of Gaul; while the insurrections of the
Bagaudae aggravated the destruction wrought by a grasping
treasury and by barbarian incursions; so that the anarchy of
the 3rd century soon aroused separatist ideas. Under Postumus
Gaul had already attempted to restore an independent though
short-lived empire (258–267); and twenty-eight years later
the tetrarchy of Diocletian proved that the blood now circulated
with difficulty from the heart to the extremities of an empire
on the eve of disintegration. Rome was to see her universal
dominion gradually menaced from all sides. It was in Gaul
that the decisive revolutions of the time were first prepared;
Constantine’s crusades to overthrow the altars of paganism,
and Julian’s campaigns to set them up again. After Constantine
the emperors of the East in the 4th century merely put in an
occasional appearance at Rome; they resided at Milan or in
the prefectorial capitals of Gaul—at Arles, at Treves (Trier),
at Reims or in Paris. The ancient territorial divisions—Belgium,
Gallia Lugdunensis (Lyonnaise), Gallia Narbonensis
(Narbonnaise)—were split up into seventeen little provinces,
which in their turn were divided into two dioceses. Thus the
great historic division was made between southern and northern
France. Roman nationality persisted, but the administrative
system was tottering.
Upon ground that had been so well levelled by Roman legislation
aristocratic institutions naturally flourished. From the
4th century onward the balance of classes was disturbed
by the development of a landed aristocracy
that grew more powerful day by day, and by the
Social disorganization
of Gaul.
corresponding ruin of the small proprietors and industrial
and commercial corporations. The members of the
curia who assisted the magistrates in the cities, crushed by the
burden of taxes, now evaded as far as possible public office or
senatorial honours. The vacancies left in this middle class by
this continual desertion were not compensated for by the progressive
advance of a lower class destitute of personal property
and constantly unsettled in their work. The peasants, no less
than the industrial labourers, suffered from the absence of any
capital laid by, which alone could have enabled them to improve
their land or to face a time of bad harvests. Having no credit
they found themselves at the mercy of their neighbours, the
great landholders, and by degrees fell into the position of tenants,
or into servitude. The curia was thus emptied both from above
and from below. It was in vain that the emperors tried to
rivet the chains of the curia in this hereditary bondage, by
attaching the small proprietor to his glebe, like the artisan
to his gild and the soldier to his legion. To such a miserable
pretence of freedom they all preferred servitude, which at least
ensured them a livelihood; and the middle class of freemen
thus became gradually extinct.
