ld provinces of
France, which had a local life, organisation, and spirit of their own,
had been taken as the units of government in 1790, the monarchy perhaps
might hardly have been abolished in 1792 by a Convention so headlong and
tumultuous that for one day it actually forgot, after abolishing the
monarchy, to establish any government in its place.

But if a republic had been founded through the action of the provinces
of France, it would probably have been harder for Napoleon to make an
end of it, than it was for Charlemagne to dispense with the recognition
of local rights to which the Merovingian kings had submitted in the
appointment of their hereditary _subreguli_, from among the local
magnates of the shires. This, it seems to me, may be inferred from the
fact, admitted on all hands in France, that the departments remain
to-day what they were at first--mere administrative divisions which have
taken no hold on the feelings and sympathies of the people, while the
'local patriotism' of the provinces is still a vivid reality.

Frenchmen are still Gascons and Provencals, Bretons and Normans,
Burgundians and Picards, and no country in the world is richer than
France in local histories and chronicles. But so late as 1877 the local
history of the Department of the Pas-de-Calais, in which I am now
writing, could be described as 'unique in France,' and this local
history is really a history, not of the department at all, but of the
two important and interesting provinces of which it consists--Artois,
namely, and the Boulonnais--each of which still preserves, after nearly
a century, its own distinctive character in the physiognomy of the
people, in their habits, their turn of mind, and their traditions. The
attempt to fuse them into a new political entity has completely failed.
No more has, apparently, come of it, locally, than would have come of
an attempt to fuse Massachusetts and Rhode Island into a Department of
Martha's Vineyard, or Kent and Sussex into a Department of New Haven.
Possibly even less. For Artois and the Boulonnais never passed
definitely under the French crown until the middle of the seventeenth
century. Even Calais, after the Duke of Guise had wrested it from
England, was conquered for Spain by the Archduke Albert, and a smiling
little agricultural commune alone now commemorates, in its name of
Therouanne, the once great and flourishing episcopal capital of Morinia
in which Clodion began the French mona