petty states, the
former governors of which, under the names of dukes, counts, marquises,
and viscounts, were pretty nearly real sovereigns. Twenty-nine great
fiefs, which have played a special part in French history, date back to
this epoch.

These petty states were not all of equal importance or in possession of a
perfectly similar independence; there were certain ties uniting them to
other states, resulting in certain reciprocal obligations which became
the basis, or, one might say, the constitution of the feudal community;
but their prevailing feature was, nevertheless, isolation, personal
existence. They were really petty states begotten from the dismemberment
of a great territory; those local governments were formed at the expense
of a central power.

From the end of the ninth pass we to the end of the tenth century, to the
epoch when the Capetians take the place of the Carlovingians. Instead of
seven kingdoms to replace the empire of Charlemagne, there were then no
more than four. The kingdoms of Provence and Trans-juran Burgundy had
formed, by re-union, the kingdom of Arles. The kingdom of Lorraine was
no more than a duchy in dispute between Allemannia and France. The
Emperor Otho the Great had united the kingdom of Italy to the empire of.
Allemannia. Overtures had produced their effects amongst the great
states. But in the interior of the kingdom of France, dismemberment had
held on its course; and instead of the twenty-nine petty states or great
fiefs observable at the end of the ninth century, we find at the end of
the tenth, fifty-five actually established. (_Vide_ Guizot's _Histoire
de la Civilisation,_ t. ii., pp. 238-246.)

Now, how was this ever-increasing dismemberment accomplished? What
causes determined it, and little by little made it the substitute for the
unity of the empire? Two causes, perfectly natural and independent of
all human calculation, one moral and the other political. They were the
absence from the minds of men of any general and dominant idea; and the
reflux, in social relations and manners, of the individual liberties but
lately repressed or regulated by the strong hand of Charlemagne. In
times of formation or transition, states and governments conform to the
measure, one had almost said to the height, of the men of the period,
their ideas, their sentiments, and their personal force of character;
when ideas are few and narrow, when sentiments spread only over a
confi