really incident upon the study of the formation of vast national
aggregates. Suffice it now to say that when the Teutons overcame Gaul,
they became rulers over a population which had been subjected for five
centuries to that slow but mighty process of trituration which the
Empire everywhere brought to bear upon local self-government. While the
Teutons in Britain, moreover, enslaved their slightly romanized subjects
and gave little heed to their language, religion, or customs; the
Teutons in Gaul, on the other hand, quickly adopted the language and
religion of their intensely romanized subjects and acquired to some
extent their way of looking at things. Hence in the early history of
France there was no such stubborn mass of old Aryan liberties to be
dealt with as in the early history of England. Nor was there any
powerful middle class distributed through the country to defend such
liberties as existed. Beneath the turbulent throng of Teutonic nobles,
among whom the king was only the most exalted and not always the
strongest, there lay the Gallo-Roman population which had so long been
accustomed to be ruled without representation by a distant government
exercising its authority through innumerable prefects. Such Teutonic
rank and file as there was became absorbed into this population; and
except in sundry chartered towns there was nothing like a social stratum
interposed between the nobles and the common people.

The slow conversion of the feudal monarchy of the early Capetians into
the absolute despotism of Louis XIV. was accomplished by the king
gradually _conquering_ his vassals one after another, and adding their
domains to his own. As one vassal territory after another was added to
the royal domain, the king sent prefects, responsible only to himself,
to administer its local affairs, sedulously crushing out, so far as
possible, the last vestiges of self-government. The nobles, deprived of
their provincial rule, in great part flocked to Paris to become idle