pacy, and the need which Pepin had of the pope in order to get his title of king sanctioned, made it a close alliance. It raised up a new race of sovereigns in Gaul, destroyed the kingdom of the_Lombards in Italy, and impelled civil and religious Gallo-Frankish society in a route which tended to make royalty prevail in the civil order, and papacy in the religious order. Such will appear to you the character of the attempts at civilization made in France by the Carlovingians, that is to say, by Charlemagne, the true representative of that new direction, although it failed in its designs, and did nothing but throw, as it were, a bridge between barbarism and feudalism. This second epoch, the history of civilization in France under the Carlovingians, in its various phases, will be the subject of the following lectures.

TWENTIETH LECTURE.

Reign of Charlemagne-Greatness of his name-Is it true that he settled nothing? that all that he did has perished with him?—Of the action of great men-They play a double part-That which they do, in virtue of the first, is durable; that which they attempt, under the second, passes away with them-Example of Napoleon-Necessity of being thoroughly acquainted with the history of events under Charlemagne, in order to understand that of civilization-How the events may be recapitulated in tables-1. Charlemagne as a warrior and conqueror; Table of his principal expeditions-Their meaning and results-2. Charlemagne as an administrator and legislator-Of the government of the provinces-Of the central government-Table of national assemblies under his reign-Table of his capitularies -Table of the acts and documents which remain of this epoch-3. Charlemagne as a protector of intellectual development: Table of the celebrated cotemporaneous men-Estimation of the general results, and of the character of his reign.

WE enter into a second great epoch of the history of French civilization, and as we enter, at the first step, we encounter a great man. Charlemagne was neither the first of his race, nor the author of its elevation. He received an already established power from his father Pepin. I have attempted to make you understand the causes of this revolution and its true character. When Charlemagne became king of the Franks, it was accomplished; he had no need even to defend it. He, however, has given his name to the second dynasty; and the instant one speaks of it, the instant one thinks of it, it is Charlemagne who presents himself before the mind as its founder and chief. Glorious privilege of a great man! No one disputes that Charlemagne had a right to give name to his race and age. The homage paid to him is often blind and undistinguishing; his genius and glory are extolled without discrimination or measure; yet, at the same time, persons repeat, one after another, that he founded nothing, accomplished nothing; that his empire, his laws, all his works, perished with him. And this historical common-place introduces a crowd of moral common-places on the ineffectualness and uselessness of great men, the vanity of their projects, the little trace which they leave in the world, after having troubled it in all directions.

Is this true? Is it the destiny of great men to be merely a burden and a useless wonder to mankind? Their activity so strong, so brilliant, can it have no lasting result? It costs. very dear to be present at the spectacle; the curtain fallen, will nothing of it remain? Should we regard these powerful and glorious chiefs of a century and a people, merely as a sterile scourge, or at very best, as a burdensome luxury? Charlemagne, in particular, should he be nothing more?

At the first glance, the common-place might be supposed to be a truth. The victories, conquests, institutions, reforms, projects, all the greatness and glory of Charlemagne, vanished with him; he seemed a meteor suddenly emerging from the darkness of barbarism, to be as suddenly lost and extinguished in that of feudality. There are other such examples in history. The world has more than once seen, we our. selves have seen an empire like it, one which took pleasure in being compared to that of Charlemagne, and had a right so to be compared; we have likewise seen it fall away with a

man.

But we must beware of trusting these appearances. Το understand the meaning of great events, and measure the agency and influence of great men, we need to look far deeper into the matter.

The activity of a great man is of two kinds; he performs two parts; two epochs may generally be distinguished in his career. First, he understands better than other people the wants of his time; its real, present exigencies; what, in the age he lives in, society needs, to enable it to subsist and attain its natural development. He understands these wants better than any other person of his time, and knows better than any other how to wield the powers of society, and direct them skilfully towards the realization of this end. Hence proceed his power and glory; it is in virtue of this, that as soon as he appears, he is understood, accepted, followed; that all give their willing aid to the work which he is performing for the benefit of all.

But he does not stop here. When the real wants of his time are in some degree satisfied, the ideas and the will of the great man proceed further. He quits the region of present facts and exigencies; he gives himself up to views in some measure personal to himself; he indulges in combinations more or less vast and spacious, but which are not, like his previous labors, founded on the actual state, the common in

stincts, the determined wishes of society, but are remote and arbitrary. He aspires to extend his activity and influence indefinitely, and to possess the future as he has possessed the present. Here egoism and illusion commence. For some

time, on the faith of what he has already done, the great man is followed in his new career; he is believed in and obeyed; men lend themselves to his fancies; his flatterers and his dupes even admire and vaunt them as his sublimest conceptions. The public, however, in whom a mere delusion is never of any long continuance, soon discovers that it is imRelled in a direction in which it has no desire to move. At first the great man had enlisted his high intelligence and powerful will in the service of the general feeling and wish; he now seeks to employ the public force in the service of his individual ideas and desires; he is attempting things which he alone wishes or understands. Hence disquietude first, and then uneasiness; for a time he is still followed, but sluggishly and reluctantly; next he is censured and complained of; finally, he is abandoned and falls; and all which he alone had planned and desired, all the merely personal and arbitrary part of his work, perishes with him.

I shall avoid no opportunity of borrowing from our age the torch which it offers, in this instance, in order to enlighten a time so distant and obscure. The fate and name of Napoleon at present belong to history. I shall not feel the least embarrassed in speaking of it, and speaking of it freely.

Every one knows that at the time when he seized the power in France, the dominant, imperious want of our country was security-without, national independence; inwardly, civil life. In the revolutionary troubles, the external and internal destiny, the state and society, were equally compromised. To replace the new France in the European confederation, to make her avowed and accepted by the other states, and to constitute her within in a peaceable and regular manner, to put her, in a word, into the possession of independence and order, the only pledges of a long future, this was the desire, the general thought of the country. Napoleon understood and accomplished it.

This finished, or nearly so, Napoleon proposed to himself a thousand others: potent in combinations, and of an ardent imagination, egoistical and thoughtful, machinator and poet, he, as it were, poured out his activity in arbitrary and gigantic projects, children of his own,-solitary, foreign to the real

wants of our time, and of our France. She followed him for some time, and at great cost, in this path which she had not selected; a day came when she would follow no further, and the emperor found himself alone, and the empire vanished, and all things returned to their proper condition, to their natural tendency.

It is an analogous fact which the reign of Charlemagne offers us at the ninth century. Despite the immense difference of time, situation, form, even groundwork, the general phenomenon is similar: these two parts of a great man, these two epochs of his career, are found in Charlemagne as in Napoleon. Let us endeavor to state them.

Here I encounter a difficulty which has long pre-occupied me, and which I do not hope to have completely surmounted. At the commencement of the course, I engaged to read you a general history of France. I have not recounted events to you; I have sought only general results, the concatenation of causes and effects, the progress of civilization, concealed under the external scenes of history; as regards the scenes themselves, I had taken it for granted that you know them. Hitherto I have cared little to know if you had taken this precaution; under the Merovingian race, events, properly so called, are of rare occurrence-so monotonous, that it is less necessary to regard them nearly general facts only are important, and they may, up to a certain point, be brought to light and understood without an exact knowledge of the details. Under the reign of Charlemagne, it is entirely different wars, political vicissitudes of all kinds, are numerous and brilliant; they occupy an important place, and general facts are concealed far behind the special facts which occupy the front of the scene. History, properly so called, envelopes and covers the history of civilization. The latter will not be clear to you unless the former is presented to you; I cannot give you an account of events, and yet you require to know them.

I have attempted to sum them up in tables, to present under that form the special facts of this epoch; those, at least, which approach nearly to general facts, and immediately concern the history of civilization. Statistical tables are looked upon in the present day, and with good reason, as one of the best means of studying the state of a society, under certain relations; why should not the same method be applied to the past? it does not produce them with vividness and animation, like