VI INTRODUCTION

is inferior in historical value to the former. It is more véhément, passionate and partial in tone, and far less founded on documentary évidence ; while too much importance is given to the Personal détails of Court life.

Michelet's health was greatly shaken by his grief at the disasters of 1870 — 71; and though the care of his wife preserved his life for the time, he died at Hyères, Feb. 9, 1874» while engaged, with indefatigable industry, upon a history of the présent century.

Michelet has been called the French Carlyle ; but the companson is unjust to Michelet as a historian. In his wide study of documents, his industrious research, his perception of the great laws of history, Michelet, with ail his occasional unfairness, his too obtrusive patriotism, his lyrical outbursts, is a real historian; while the capricious and unmethodical studies of Carlyle, and his inaccuracy in almost every détail of his narratives, deprive his works of authority as historiés. Michelet excelled in throwing himself into the life of a past âge, and setting it vividly before our eyes.

The présent work — Louis XI et Charles le Téméraire — is a popular abridgement of the sixth volume of Michelet's History of France. It represents the author's historical talent at its best, before the great change in his method of writing took place, and before the approach to modem times in the subject aroused modem préjudices in the writer. The time of Louis XI. was well adapted to show Michelet at his best. It is an âge which needs his faculty of insight and narration to make it at ail interesting to a reader; while there is no person in it for whom enthusiasm can be felt by any one. The record of the fifteenth century is generally répulsive. Neither Louis XI. nor Charles the Bold can be called heroic by any stretch of flattery — the former a suspicious and perBdious tyrant, whose victory we grudge him, even while We admit that it was bénéficiai to France ; the latter a ruler as heterogeneous as his own dominions, possessing enough chivalry to spoil his policy and enough policy to stain his chivalry, and assuming ail the attributes of a great conqueror, while without any real militsury talent It is

INTRODUCTION. Vil

impossible even to feel sympathy with the Swiss who conquered Charles the Bold. They were not defending their freedom against a foreign tyrant, but carrying out an aggression on the lands of a neighbour disposed to be friendly ; their great bravery was disgraced by as great a cruelty ; and in striking down Burgundy at the bidding and for the gold of Louis XL, they were inaugurating that System of mercenary service abroad which became afterwards the shame of the Swiss name. Thus even a historian so prone to enthusiasm as Michelet cannot be other than sober and impartial

Louis XL of France was one of the group of prudent and scheming sovereigns who reigned at the close of the I5th century, and helped to consolidate the great monarchies of the i6th century. Henry VIL reduced the anarchy of the Roses to order in England. Ferdinand the Cathôlic crushed the alien power of the Moors and united the Spanish kingdoms. It was the work of Louis XL to détermine the future of France, and to found fîrmly that centralized and absolute French monarchy which was to last, with slight interruptions, till the Révolution.

The unification of France under Philip Augustus and Philip the Fair, and their apparently absolute rule, had been prématuré. The later kings themselves helped to revive the divisions of the kingdom by granting great fiefs to members of the royal house — the noblesse of the fleurs-de4is as they were called — and this course, as in England, produced civil war. This civil war had favoured an English invasion that almost conquered the whole of France; and though Charles VIL had been able, aided by the revival of French vigour under Jeanne d'Arc, to expel the English, he had first to buy off their ally, the Duke of Burgundy, the most powerful of the French princes, by concessions that enabled his power to overshadow the crown. John ** the Good" had invested his favourite son Philip the Bold with the Duchy of Burgundy, which had fallen to the crown ; and Philip added to it by marriage Franche Comté or the County of Burgundy, and Flanders. Philip^s son, John the Fearless, added much to thèse dominions before his murder on the bridge of Montereau; and his son Philip the Good, ally

Sonl^on: C. J. CLAY and SONS,