Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/596

 588 REVIEWS OF BOOKS October proof of this bold thesis was reserved for later volumes, and especially for that study of the ' nationalites regionales ', a* portion of which is contained in the present volume. But it cannot be said that what we have before us makes us convinced enough to accept M. Flach's point of view. M. Flach worked for some thirty years on his self-appointed task and deserved every respect for his scholarship, his perseverance, his ingenuity, and his devotion. While these lines are being written the tidings come of his death before his long labour has altogether been completed. But even the earlier volumes of his treatise, with all their merits, showed shortcomings which are sensibly heightened ifi the instalment we have before us. They leave us with a feeling that his method was, to put it bluntly, not quite the method of the historian. He was too subtle, too theoretical, too ' juristic ', and, upon occasion, too much given to put his own interpretation on the texts which he has collected with such laborious thoroughness. Nor was he always consistent with himself. He wins our assent when he denounces those who would read the technique of thirteenth- century feudal law into the tangled confusion of the tenth and eleventh century. But is not his own method of explaining his facts that of the modern lawyer rather than that of the scientific scholar who seeks to make the facts tell their own tale ? His doctrines of the ' groupe ethnique ' and of the ' principate ' are at least as modern and as unhistorical as those which he denounces. And finishing off this new volume in the midst of the great war, has he not brought modern prejudices into the discussion of purely archaeo- logical problems ? He is anxious to prove that Lorraine, in the tenth- and eleventh-century sense of that term, was French and not Grerman, that it was, as he says, ' le coeur meme du regnum Francorum ', ' une France par excellence '. And Alsace, indistinguishable from Lorraine by M. Flach, but difEerent to the eye of modern common sense by reason of its German speech, may well desire to be French nowadays not because of, but in spite of, its predominantly Teutonic history. In truth neither Alsace nor • Lorraine were either French or German in our sense, for in those days there was neither a French nor a German nation. And to apply such a modern category is to distort the facts and to confuse modern aspira- tions with unessential historical traditions. Indeed, as a matter of fact, M. Flach's ' Lorraine ' never had belonged to the western kingdom before the e^rly tenth century, and, soon after, went over permanently to the eastern realm. But whatever may have been the case then, it has nothing to do with our opinion as to what should happen to Lorraine or Alsace in the present day. That is a practical question which the fortune of war, sup- ported by the wishes of the populations concerned, has agreed to settle in a fashion that will not be displeasing to M. Flach or to any other wise historian. But it is to prostitute the science to trace through history ' r usurpation germanique et les revendications franfaises ', as if Otto the Great were a real predecessor of Kaiser William II, and as if every clash of arms between French-speaking and German-speaking peoples in the early middle ages were an anticipation of the armed conflicts of the nations that we have witnessed during the last few generations. It is true that the * patriotic ' school of German historians have misused their