It was France that first brought an orderly nationalism out of feudal chaos; it was her royal house of Capet that rallied Europe to the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre and led the greatest of the crusades to Palestine.  Yet the France of the last crusades was within a century the France of Crecy, just as the France of Austerlitz was more speedily the France of Waterloo; and men who followed the tricolour at Solferino lived to see it furled in humiliation at Sedan.  No other country has had a history as prolific in triumph and reverse, in epochs of peaceful progress and periods of civil commotion, in pageant and tragedy, in all that gives fascination to historical narrative.  Happy the land whose annals are tiresome!  Not such has been the fortune of poor old France.

The sage Tocqueville has somewhere remarked that whether France was loved or hated by the outside world she could not be ignored.  That is very true.  The Gaul has at all stages of his national history defied an attitude of indifference in others.  His country has been at many times the head and at all times the heart of Europe.  His hysteria has made Europe hysterical, while his sober national sense at critical moments has held the whole continent to good behaviour.  For a half-dozen centuries there was never a squabble at any remote part of Europe in which France did not stand ready and willing to take a hand on the slightest opportunity.  That policy, as pursued particularly by Louis XIV and the Bonapartes, made a heavy drain in brawn and brain on the vitality of the race; but despite it all, the peaceful achievements of France within her own borders continued to astonish mankind.  It is this astounding vigour, this inexhaustible stamina, this unexampled recuperative power that has at all times made France a nation which, whether men admire or condemn her policy, can never be treated with indifference.  It was these qualities which enabled her, throughout exhausting foreign troubles, to retain her leadership in European scholarship, in philosophy, art, and architecture; this is what has enabled France to be the grim warrior of Europe without ceasing ever to be the idealist of the nations.

It was during one of her proud and prosperous eras that France began her task of creating an empire beyond the Atlantic.  At no time, indeed, was she better equipped for the work.  No power of Western Europe since the days of Roman glory had possessed such facilities for conquering and governing new lands.  If ever there was a land able and ready to take up the white man’s burden it was the France of the seventeenth century.  The nation had become the first military power of Europe.  Spain and Italy had ceased to be serious rivals.  Even England, under the Stuart dynasty, tacitly admitted the military primacy of France.  Nor was this superiority of the French confined to the science of war.  It passed unquestioned in the arts of peace.  Even Rome at the height of her power could not dominate every field of human