ARCHITECTURE - Karatunov.net

32FRANCE [CH. xixand doors, information just enough to tantalize us, wehave nothing to tell us what the churches of Perpetuusand his contemporaries were like ; nothing to show hownearly they approached the standard of Ravenna, or fellshort of it.Decay of The letters of Sidonius are the swan-songof RomanRoman culture in Gaul. The polite societythat still existed inculturethe 5tj1 Century was gradually submerged beneath theflowing tide of barbarism." Roman society was destroyedin Gaul," says M. Guizot, "not as a valleyisravagedby a torrent, but as the most solid body is disorganizedby the continual infiltration of a foreign substance 1 .The arts shared the fate of the generalculture and sankwith it. In the next century no such church as that ofPope Patiens could have been built at Lyons.Dearth of Viollet-le-Duc 2 remarks that we possess only veryve?toch vague ideas of the primitivechurches on the soil oftenureFrance, and that it isonly from the loth century downwardsthat we can form a passablyexact conception ofwhat they were like.differed considerably.In each province of France theyAnd when we do meet with anythinglike a continuous series of examples, we find itimpossibleto treat of French architecture as a whole. At firstProyin-styks^ Latin influence was paramount, but it affected theFrancearchitecture of the several provinces in very differentways. During the whole period of Romanesque Art,and indeed for much longer, France was not an unitedcountry, but a group of independent, or semi-independentstates. Nor was the population homogeneous. In thenorth and east, which lay more opento colonization byTeutonic invaders, Goths, Franks, Burgundians and5 '1 Guizot, Civilization in France^ Lect. VIII.2 Viollet-le-Duc, Diet, Rais. vol. v. p. 162.