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HISTORY] The authorized colonial loans, omitting Algeria and Tunisia, during the period 1884–1904 amounted to £19,200,000, the sums paid for interest and sinking funds on loans varying from £600,000 to £800,000 a year. The amount of French capital invested in French colonies and protectorates, including Algeria and Tunisia, was estimated in 1905 at £120,000,000, French capital invested in foreign countries at the same date being estimated at ten times that amount (see Ques. Dip. et Col., February 16, 1905).

Commerce.—The value of the external trade of the French possessions, exclusive of Algeria and Tunisia, increased in the ten years 1896–1905 from £18,784,060 to £34,957,479. In the last-named year the commerce of Algeria amounted to £24,506,020 and that of Tunisia to £5,969,248, making a grand total for French colonial trade in 1905 of £65,432,746. The figures were made up as follows:

Over three-fourths of the trade of Algeria and Tunisia is with France and other French possessions. In the other colonies and protectorates more than half the trade is with foreign countries. The foreign countries trading most largely with the French colonies are, in the order named, British colonies and Great Britain, China and Japan, the United States and Germany. The value of the trade with British colonies and Great Britain in 1905 was over £7,200,000.

.—P. Joanne, Dictionnaire géographique et administrative de la France (8 vols., Paris, 1890–1905); C. Brossard, La France et ses colonies (6 vols., Paris, 1900–1906); O. Reclus, Le Plus Beau Royaume sous le ciel (Paris, 1899); Vidal de La Blache, La ''France. Tableau géographique'' (Paris, 1908); V. E. Ardouin-Dumazet, Voyage en France (Paris, 1894); H. Havard, La France artistique et monumentale (6 vols., Paris, 1892–1895); A. Lebon and P. Pelet, France as it is, tr. Mrs W. Arnold (London, 1888); articles on “Local Government in France” in the Stock Exchange Official Intelligence Annuals (London, 1908 and 1909); M. Block, Dictionnaire de l’administration française, the articles in which contain full bibliographies (2 vols., Paris, 1905); E. Levasseur, La France et ses colonies (3 vols., Paris, 1890); M. Fallex and A. Mairey, La France et ses colonies au début du XX&#8202;e siècle, which has numerous bibliographies (Paris, 1909); J. du Plessis de Grenédan, Géographie agricole de la France et du monde (Paris, 1903); F. de St Genis, La Propriété rurale en France (Paris, 1902); H. Baudrillart, Les Populations agricoles de la France (3 vols., Paris, 1885–1893); J. E. C. Bodley, France (London, 1899); A. Girault, Principes de colonisation et de législation coloniale (3 vols., Paris, 1907–1908); Les Colonies françaises, an encyclopaedia edited by M. Petit (2 vols., Paris, 1902). Official statistical works: Annuaire statistique de la France (a summary of the statistical publications of the government), Statistique agricole annuelle, Statistique de l’industrie minérale et des appareils de vapeur, Tableau général du commerce et de la navigation, Reports on the various colonies issued annually by the British Foreign Office, &c. Guide Books: Karl Baedeker, Northern France, Southern France; P. Joanne, Nord, Champagne et Ardenne; Normandie; and other volumes dealing with every region of the country.

The identity of the earliest inhabitants of Gaul is veiled in obscurity, though philologists, anthropologists and archaeologists are using the glimmer of traditions collected by ancient historians to shed a faint twilight upon that remote past. The subjugation of those primitive tribes did

not mean their annihilation: their blood still flows in the veins of Frenchmen; and they survive also on those megalithic monuments (see ) with which the soil of France is dotted, in the drawings and sculptures of caves hollowed out along the sides of the valleys, and in the arms and ornaments yielded by sepulchral tumuli, while the names of the rivers and mountains of France probably perpetuate the first utterances of those nameless generations.

The first peoples of whom we have actual knowledge are the Iberians and Ligurians. The Basques who now inhabit both sides of the Pyrenean range are probably the last representatives of the Iberians, who came from Spain to settle between the Mediterranean and the Bay of Biscay. The Ligurians, who exhibited the hard cunning characteristic of the Genoese Riviera, must have been descendants of that Indo-European vanguard who occupied all northern Italy and the centre and south-east

of France, who in the 7th century received the Phocaean immigrants at Marseilles, and who at a much later period were encountered by Hannibal during his march to Rome, on the banks of the Rhône, the frontier of the Iberian and Ligurian territories. Upon these peoples it was that the conquering minority of Celts or Gauls imposed themselves, to be succeeded at a later date by the Roman aristocracy.

When Gaul first enters the field of history, Rome has already laid the foundation of her freedom, Athens dazzles the eastern Mediterranean with her literature and her art, while in the west Carthage and Marseilles are lining opposite shores with their great houses of commerce. Coming

from the valley of the Danube in the 6th century, the Celts or Gauls had little by little occupied central and southern Europe long before they penetrated into the plains of the Saône, the Seine, and the Loire as far as the Spanish border, driving out the former inhabitants of the country. A century later their political hegemony, extending from the Black Sea to the Strait of Gibraltar, began to disintegrate, and the Gauls then embarked on more distant migrations, from the Columns of Hercules to the plateaux of Asia Minor, taking Rome on their way. Their empire in Gaul, encroached upon in the north by the Belgae, a kindred race, and in the south by the Iberians, gradually contracted in area and eventually crumbled to pieces. This process served the turn of the Romans, who little by little had subjugated first the Cisalpine Gauls and afterwards those inhabiting

the south-east of France, which was turned into a Roman province in the 2nd century. Up to this time Hellenism and the mercantile spirit of the Jews had almost exclusively dominated the Mediterranean littoral, and at first the Latin spirit only won foothold for itself in various spots on the western coast—as at Aix in Provence (123 ) and at Narbonne (118 ). A refuge of Italian pauperism in the time of the Gracchi, after the triumph of the oligarchy the Narbonnaise became a field for shameless exploitation, besides providing, under the proconsulate of Caesar, an excellent point of observation whence to watch the intestine quarrels between the different nations of Gaul.

These are divided by Caesar in his Commentaries into three groups: the Aquitanians to the south of the Garonne; the Celts, properly so called, from the Garonne to the Seine and the Marne; and the Belgae, from the Seine to the Rhine. But these ethnological names cover a very

great variety of half-savage tribes, differing in speech and in institutions, each surrounded by frontiers of dense forests abounding in game. On the edges of these forests stood isolated dwellings like sentinel outposts; while the inhabitants of the scattered hamlets, caves hollowed in the ground, rude circular huts or lake-dwellings, were less occupied with domestic life than with war and the chase. On the heights, as at Bibracte, or on islands in the rivers, as at Lutetia, or protected by marshes, as at Avaricum, oppida—at once fortresses and places of refuge, like the Greek Acropolis—kept watch and ward over the beaten tracks and the rivers of Gaul.

These primitive societies of tall, fair-skinned warriors, blue-eyed and red-haired, were gradually organized into political bodies of various kinds—kingdoms, republics and federations—and divided into districts or pagi (pays) to which divisions the minds of the country folk have

remained faithfully attached ever since. The victorious aristocracy of the kingdom dominated the other classes, strengthened by the prestige of birth, the ownership of the soil and the practice of arms. Side by side with this martial nobility the Druids constituted a priesthood unique in ancient times; neither hereditary as in India, nor composed of isolated priests as in Greece, nor of independent colleges as at Rome, it was a true corporation, which at first possessed great moral authority, though by Caesar’s time it had lost both strength and prestige. Beneath these were the common people attached to the soil,