A Short History of France from Caesar to Waterloo

Book excerpt: Two thousand years ago the name of France was Gaul. When Julius Caesar invaded the country, some fifty years before the birth of Christ, he found it divided into three principal parts: there was Aquitaine, the land of springs and waters, extending, in the southwest, from the ocean to the Garonne, already a land of pleasant life, rich in commerce and refinement; there was Celtic Gaul, the west, which reached from the Atlantic to the Marne and the Seine; and there was Belgian Gaul (as Caesar calls it), that north-eastern space between the Seine and the Rhine: an expanse which roughly corresponds to the provinces devastated by the Great War. Metz, Toul, Verdun, Soissons, Châlons, Saint-Quentin, Arras, Toumai, Cambrai, Noyon, Beauvais, Amiens, and Boulogne were even then the towns of Belgian Gaul. And the inhabitants of these districts, said the Roman General, are braver than any others "because not corrupted by the culture and humanities of the Roman Province [that is to say Provence, already completely Latinized] nor made effeminate by the passage of our merchants."