To imperfect human vision it would have seemed at the time a fatal mistake to bury out of sight the refinements which a Latin civilization had been for nearly five centuries planting in Gaul.  But so often has this been repeated in the history of the world, one is compelled to recognize it as a part of the evolutionary method.  Again and again have we seen old civilizations effaced by barbarians.  But these barbarians with their coarseness and brutality have usually brought something better than refinement; a spirit so transforming, so vitalizing, that we are compelled to believe it was the end sought in the catastrophe we deplore:  that is, a spirit of liberty, a sense of personal independence, without which the refinements of art, even reinforced by genius, are unavailing.  Such was undoubtedly the invigorating leaven brought into Gaul by the Frank, although for a time he succumbed to the enervating Gallic influence, and, while conquering and subduing, was himself conquered and subdued.

The cultivated Roman in his toga appealed to the imagination of the fine barbarian; the habits of the Romanized cities were a tempting model for imitation.  Bridges, aqueducts, palaces, with their splendid mingling of strength and beauty, fragments of which still linger to convince us of our inferiority, these were awe-inspiring to the Frank and filled him with longings to drink deep at this fountain of civilization.  The heroic strain brought by Clovis was quickly enfeebled and debauched by luxury.  The court of the Merovingian king became a miserable assemblage of half-Romanized barbarians covered with the frayed and worn-out mantle of imperialism.  It is a strange picture we have of this descendant of Clovis, this Roi Faineant (Do-nothing King) in a royal procession on a state occasion.  Curled and perfumed, he emerges from the Palais des Thermes, attended in great pomp by Romans and Romanized Frankish warriors.  Then, in remembrance of the primitive simplicity of his ancestral line, sitting alone in a wagon drawn by bullocks, he leads the pageant through the narrow streets of old Paris.

But while masquerading as a simple barbarian he was only a poor imitator of the vices and dregs of a perishing civilization.  But in proof that virility was still a characteristic of the Frank in Gaul, we are told that while the Church and the offices of State were filled by Romans or Gallo-Romans, the army at this time was composed entirely of Franks.

With the degeneracy of these Rois Faineants the kingdom of Clovis was gradually shrinking, and men were already waiting to seize the power as it fell from incompetent hands.  When Clovis made gifts of large estates to reward, or to purchase, followers, Roman or Gallic, he laid the foundations of a system which would prove fatal to his successors.  With these estates came titles and authority, multiplying and growing with each succeeding reign.  A count, who was the chief officer of a county, was in fact the sovereign of a small state, and so on a smaller scale were a duke or a marquis.  And it was to these smaller bodies that the power naturally gravitated as it vanished from the throne.