Like Calais, St.-Omer, and other cities of this region, Aire offered a refuge in 1553 to the unfortunate inhabitants of the ancient historic city of Thérouanne, which, after a heroic defence by d'Essé de Montmorency, was taken in that year, five days after the death on the ramparts of the gallant commander, by the troops of Charles the Fifth, and by his orders razed to the ground. The details of this merciless destruction recall the sack of Rome by the Imperialists; and it is the blackest feature in the black record of the First French Revolution that the men who then got control for a time of the government of France, in the names of Liberty and Progress, deliberately and wantonly rivalled the most unscrupulous of the kings and emperors whom they were constantly denouncing, in their treatment, not of foreign fortresses conquered in war, but of French cities, of the lives and the property of French citizens, and of the most precious monuments of French history. Charles the Bold at Dinant and Charles the Fifth at Thérouanne were outdone, in the prostituted name of the French people, by the younger Robespierre at Toulon and by the paralytic Couthon at Lyons.
The annals of these north-eastern cities of modern France are full of most curious and valuable materials for a really instructive history of the French people. The most cursory acquaintance with them suffices to show how much worse than worthless are the huge political pamphlets which during the last hundred years have passed current with the world as histories of the French Revolution, and how important to the future, not of France alone but of civilisation, is the work begun in our own times by writers like Mortimer-Ternaux, Granier de Cassagnac, Baudrillart, Biré, and Henri Taine. Here in Artois, under the conflicting influences of Flemish, Spanish, and French laws and customs, a genuine development of social and political life may be traced as clearly as in Scotland or in England, down to the sudden and violent strangulation of French progress by the incompetent States-General and the not less incompetent king in 1789.
The archives of Aire show that the question of public education was a practical question there, at least as far back as at the beginning of the seventeenth century. In 1613, the magistrates asked and obtained the permission of the Archduke Albert and the Archduchess Isabella to lay a special tax on the city of Aire and two adjoining villages, for the purpose of founding a college, private citizens having already given an endowment of 750 florins a year for this object. The importance of this contribution may be estimated from the fact that after the siege of Aire by the French in 1641, a sum of I,000 florins left to the Collegiate Church of Aire by a canon of Tournay was found sufficient to restore the chapel of Our Lady, the whole right wing of the church, and many houses belonging to the canons, which had all been destroyed by the French artillery. No time was lost in opening the college to the youth of the city and the suburbs, and only a few years afterwards the priests in charge of it wrote to the Seigneur de Thiennes, asking for further endowments in order to increase the number of the teachers to twenty, so great was the affluence of scholars from all the country around, 'to the number at that time of more than three hundred.' The collegiate chapter of Aire appointed one of its canons superintendent of the school, under the title of the 'Ecolâtre.' There really seems to be as little foundation in fact for the common notion that there was no provision made for the education of the people in France before 1789, as for the notion, not less common, that there were no peasant proprietors in France before 1789. It is hardly excusable even that Mr. Carlyle, rhapsodising more than fifty years ago about the 'dumb despairing millions,' should have fallen into this error. For though De Tocqueville and Taine had not then exploded it in detail, Necker, in whose career Carlyle took so much interest, not only declared officially that there was 'an immense number' of such proprietors in France, but took the trouble to explain how it had come about. The law of 1790 establishing the land-tax required every parish to furnish a detailed account of the then existing properties in land, and it is shown by these that there then existed in France nearly two-thirds as many landholders as now exist, although the population of the country is now about twenty-five per cent. greater than it then was.