Shewing the Departments.]
The earlier kings of France.
1. France.—The country we now know
as France is the tract of land shut in by the British
Channel, the Bay of Biscay, the Pyrenees, the Mediterranean,
and the Alps. But this country only gained the
name of France by degrees. In the earliest days
of which we have any account, it was peopled by the
Celts, and it was known to the Romans as part of a
larger country which bore the name of Gaul. After
all of it, save the north-western moorlands, or what
we now call Brittany, had been conquered and settled
by the Romans, it was overrun by tribes of the great
Teutonic race, the same family to which Englishmen
belong. Of these tribes, the Goths settled in
the provinces to the south; the Burgundians, in the
east, around the Jura; while the Franks, coming over
the rivers in its unprotected north-eastern corner,
and making themselves masters of a far wider territory,
broke up into two kingdoms—that of the
Eastern Franks in what is now Germany, and that of
the Western Franks reaching from the Rhine to the Atlantic.
These Franks subdued all the other Teutonic conquerors
of Gaul, while they adopted the religion, the language,
and some of the civilization of the Romanized Gauls
who became their subjects. Under the second Frankish
dynasty, the Empire was renewed in the West, where
it had been for a time put an end to by these Teutonic
invasions, and the then Frankish king, Charles the
Great, took his place as Emperor at its head.
But in the time of his grandsons the various kingdoms
and nations of which the Empire was composed, fell
apart again under different descendants of his.
One of these, Charles the Bald, was made King
of the Western Franks in what was termed the Neustrian,
or “not eastern,” kingdom, from which
the present France has sprung. This kingdom in
name covered all the country west of the Upper Meuse,
but practically the Neustrian king had little power
south of the Loire; and the Celts of Brittany were
never included in it.
2. The House of Paris.—The great danger
which this Neustrian kingdom had to meet came from
the Northmen, or as they were called in England the
Danes. These ravaged in Neustria as they ravaged
in England; and a large part of the northern coast,
including the mouth of the Seine, was given by Charles
the Bald to Rolf or Rollo, one of their leaders, whose
land became known as the Northman’s land, or
Normandy. What most checked the ravages of these
pirates was the resistance of Paris, a town which
commanded the road along the river Seine; and it was
in defending the city of Paris from the Northmen,
that a warrior named Robert the Strong gained the
trust and affection of the inhabitants of the Neustrian
