establish all that system of taxes, enlistment, and administration, which had fallen into ruin. In a word, barbaric royalty, narrow and crude as it was, endeavored to develope itself, and fill, in some measure, the enormous frame of imperial royalty. For a long while the course of things was not favorable to it, and its first attempts were attended with little success; nevertheless, we may see, from the beginning, that something of the imperial royalty will remain to it; that the new royalty will by and bye gather a portion of that imperial inheritance, the whole of which it desired to appropriate at the first; immediately after the invasion, it became less warlike, more religious, and more politic than it had hitherto been, that is to say, it assumed more of the character of the imperial royalty. Here, if I mistake not, is the first great fact of that labor which was about to give birth to the new society; that fact is not clearly manifest as yet, but glimpses of it are easily to be caught.

The second great fact is the birth of the territorial aristocracy. Property, for a long time after the settlement of the barbarians, seemed uncertain, fluctuating and confused, passing from one hand to another with surprising rapidity. Nevertheless, it is clear that it prepared to become fixed in the same hands, and to regulate itself. The tendency of fees is to become hereditary; and, in spite of the obstacles which oppose it, the principle of inheritance prevails therein more and more. At the same time there arose between the possessors of the fees that hierarchical organization which afterwards became the feudal system. We must not transport into the sixth and seventh centuries the feudalism of the thirteenth ; nothing like it then existed; the disorder of property and personal relations was infinitely greater than under the feudal system; nevertheless all things concurred, on the one hand, to render property fixed; on the other, to constitute the society of the proprietors according to a certain hierarchy. As we have seen royalty dawning from the end of the sixth century, so likewise, we may discover, from that period, the dawn of feudalism.

Finally, a third fact also developed itself at this epoch. I have engaged your attention with the state of the church; you have seen what power it had, and how it was, so to speak, the sole living remnant of Roman society. When the barbarians were established, let us see in what situation the church found itself, or, at least, what that situation soon be

came.

The bishops were, as you know, the natural chiefs of the towns; they governed the people in the interior of each city, they represented them in the presence of the barbarians, they were their magistrates within, and their protectors without. The clergy were therefore deeply rooted in the municipal system, that is to say, in all that remained of Roman society. And they very soon struck root in other directions; the bishops became the counsellors of the barbarous kings; they counselled them upon the conduct which they ought to observe towards the vanquished people, upon the course they ought to take in order to become the heirs of the Roman emperors. They had far more experience and political intelligence than the barbarians, who came fresh from Germany; they had the love of power, they had been accustomed to serve and to profit by it. They were thus the counsellors of the nascent royalty, while they remained the magistrates and patrons of the still surviving municipality.

Behold them connected on the one hand with the people, on the other with thrones. But this was not all; a third position now opened itself to them; they became great proprietors; they entered into that hierarchical organization of manorial property which, as yet, scarcely existed but in tendency; they labored to occupy, and soon succeeded in occupying, a considerable place therein. So that at this epoch, while yet the new society was in its first rudiments, the church was already connected with all its parts, was everywhere in good repute and powerful; a sure sign that it would be the first to attain dominion; as happened.

Such were the three great facts-obscure as yet, but visible— by which the new social order announced itself, at the end of the sixth and the beginning of the seventh century. It is, I believe, impossible to mistake them; but, in recognizing them, we must remember that neither of them had as yet taken the position and the form which it was to retain. All things were still mixed and confused to such a degree, that it must have been impossible for the shrewdest sight to have discerned any of the characteristics of the future. I have already had occasion to say, and in your studies you have had opportunities of becoming convinced, that there exists no modern system, no pretension to power, which has not discovered grounds for its legitimacy in these beginnings of our society. Royalty regards itself as the only heir of the Roman empire. The feudal aristocracy asserts that, at that

time, it possessed the entire country, men and lands; the towns affirm that they succeeded to all the rights of the Roman municipalities; the clergy, that they then shared all power. This singular epoch has lent itself to all the requirements of party spirit, to all the hypotheses of science; it has furnished arguments and arms to nations, to kings, to grandees, to priests, to liberty as well as to aristocracy, to aristocracy as well as to royalty.

The fact is, it carried all things in its bosom, theocracy, monarchy, oligarchy, republics, mixed constitutions; and all things in a state of confusion which has allowed each to see all that it chose to see therein. The obscure and irregular fermentation of the wrecks of former society, German as well as Roman, and the first labors of their transformation into elements of the new society, constituted the true condition of Gaul during the sixth and seventh centuries, and this is the only character we can assign to it.

NINTH LECTURE.

Object of the lecture--False idea of the Salic law-History of the formation of this law--Two hypotheses upon this matter--Eighteen manuscripts--Two texts of the Salic law-M. Wiarda's work upon the history and exposition of the Salic law--Prefaces attached to the manuscripts--Value of national traditions concerning the origin and compilation of the Salic law--Concerning its tendencies--It is essentially a penal code-1st. Of the enumeration and definition of offences in the Salic law; 2d. Of penalties; 3d. Of criminal procedure-Transitory character of this legislation.

WE are to occupy ourselves now with the barbarian laws, and especially with the Salic law, upon which I must give certain minute details, indispensable to a knowledge of the true character of this law, and of the social state which is indicated thereby. People have been deeply, and for a long while, deceived upon this point. A greatly exaggerated importance has been attributed to the Salic law. You are acquainted with the reason of this error; you know that at the accession of Philippe-le-Long, and during the struggle of Philippe-deValois and Edward III. for the crown of France, the Salic law was invoked in order to prevent the succession of women, and that, from that time, it has been celebrated by a crowd of writers, as the first source of our public law, as a law always in vigor, as the fundamental law of monarchy. Those who have been the most free from this illusion, as, for example, Montesquieu, have yet experienced, to some degree, its influence, and have spoken of the Salic law with a respect which it is assuredly difficult to feel towards it when we attribute to it only the place that it really holds in our history. We might be tempted to believe that the majority of the writers who have spoken of this law had studied neither its history nor its scope; that they were equally ignorant of its source and of its character. These are the two questions which we have now to solve: we must learn, on the one hand, in what manner the Salic law was compiled, when, where, by whom, and for whom; on the other, what the object and plan of its dispositions were.

As regards its history, I pray you to recall that which I have already told you touching the double origin and the incoherence of the barbarous laws; they were, at once, anterior and posterior to the invasion; at once, German, and GermanoRoman they belonged to two different conditions of society. This character has influenced all the controversies of which the Salic law has been the object; it has given rise to two hypotheses according to one, this law was compiled in Germany, upon the right bank of the Rhine, long before the conquest, and in the language of the Franks; everything in its provisions which is not suitable to that period, and to ancient German society, according to this hypothesis, was introduced afterwards, in the successive revisions which occurred after the invasion. According to the other hypothesis, the Salic law was, on the contrary, compiled after the conquest, upon the left bank of the Rhine, in Belgium or in Gaul, perhaps in the seventh century, and in Latin.

Nothing is more natural than the conflict of these hypotheses; they necessarily arose from the Salic law itself. A peculiar circumstance tended to provoke them.

In the manuscripts which remain to us, there are two texts of this law: the one unmixedly Latin; the other Latin also, but mixed with a great number of German words, of glosses, and of expositions, in the ancient Frankish tongue, intercalated in the course of the articles. It contains two hundred and fifty-three intercalations of this kind. The second text was published at Basil, in 1557, by the jurisconsult, John Herold, from a manuscript in the Abbey of Fulda. The purely Latin text was published, for the first time, in Paris, without date, or the name of the editor; and, for the second time, by John Dutillet, also in Paris, in 1573. have since gone through many editions.

Both texts

Of these two texts there exist eighteen manuscripts1namely, fifteen of the unmixed Latin text, and three of that in which Germanic words appear. Of these manuscripts, fifteen have been found upon the left bank of the Rhine, in France, and only three in Germany. You might be inclined to suppose that the three manuscripts found in Germany, are those which contain the German glosses: but such is not the

1 If I do not err, M. Pertz has recently discovered two others; but nothing has as yet been published concerning them.