French History from Caesar to Waterloo

When Julius Caesar invaded the country, some fifty years before the birth of Christ, he found it divided into three principal parts: there was Aquitaine, the land of springs and waters, extending, in the southwest, from the ocean to the Garonne, already a land of pleasant life, rich in commerce and refinement; there was Celtic Gaul, the west, which reached from the Atlantic to the Marne and the Seine; and there was Belgian Gaul (as Caesar calls it), that north-eastern space between the Seine and the Rhine: an expanse which roughly corresponds to the provinces devastated by the Great War... ”Coming from Italy to conquer first Gaul, and then the German tribes, Caesar was struck by the difference in the worlds that reach from the two banks of the Rhine, and suddenly struck out an idea which, since then, has made much stir in the world; that the Rhine was the natural frontier of Gaul. On the left bank were studded villages with their fields and gardens, for the Celts were builders and agriculturists. Industry and prosperity reigned in their settlements, great were their ingenuity and order, and they would have been richer and more admirable still but for their extraordinary taste for civil conflict, for wars and rumours of wars, for party strife and turbulent agitation. The Gauls were ever lovers of a new thing, “omnes fere Gallos novis rebus studere.” Any change was welcome, and especially a change in the direction of stir and strife.“In Gaul [writes Caesar] not only every town, but every village and countryside is divided into opposite factions. And indeed almost every family is thus split up into two camps, each with a chief who protects his partisans.”...