but France was saved by the stubborn resistance of the national spirit and by Joan of Arc, inspired by God.  One hundred and twenty-eight years after the triumph of the national cause, and four years after the accession of Henry IV., which was still disputed by the League, a decree of the parliament of Paris, dated the 28th of June, 1593, maintained, against the pretensions of Spain, the authority of the Salic law, and on the 1st of October, 1789, a decree of the National Assembly, in conformity with the formal and unanimous wish of the memorials drawn up by the states-general, gave a fresh sanction to that principle, which, confining the heredity of the crown to the male line, had been salvation to the unity and nationality of the monarchy in France.

CHAPTER XIX.——­THE COMMUNES AND THE THIRD ESTATE.

The history of the Merovingians is that of barbarians invading Gaul and settling upon the ruins of the Roman empire.  The history of the Carlovingians is that of the greatest of the barbarians taking upon himself to resuscitate the Roman empire, and of Charlemagne’s descendants disputing amongst themselves for the fragments of his fabric, as fragile as it was grand.  Amidst this vast chaos and upon this double ruin was formed the feudal system, which by transformation after transformation became ultimately France.  Hugh Capet, one of its chieftains, made himself its king.  The Capetians achieved the French kingship.  We have traced its character and progressive development from the eleventh to the fourteenth century, through the reigns of Louis the Fat, of Philip Augustus, of St. Louis, and of Philip the Handsome, princes very diverse and very unequal in merit, but all of them able and energetic.  This period was likewise the cradle of the French nation.  That was the time when it began to exhibit itself in its different elements, and to arise under monarchical rule from the midst of the feudal system.  Its earliest features and its earliest efforts in the long and laborious work of its development are now to be set before the reader’s eyes.

The two words inscribed at the head of this chapter, the Communes and the Third-Estate, are verbal expressions for the two great facts at that time revealing that the French nation was in labor of formation.  Closely connected one with the other and tending towards the same end, these two facts are, nevertheless, very diverse, and even when they have not been confounded, they have not been with sufficient clearness distinguished and characterized, each of them apart.  They are diverse both in their chronological date and their social importance.  The Communes are the first to appear in history.  They appear there as local facts, isolated one from another, often very different in point of origin, though analogous in their aim, and in every case neither assuming nor pretending to assume any place in the government of the state.