came into existence." In this rapid growth of French national consciousness Normandy had its full share, and some of its great scenes are set on Norman soil. It was at Rouen that Joan of Arc was tried and condemned by the Inquisition; it was in the old market-place of this same city that the English soldiers discovered too late that they had burned a saint.
And so it came about that twenty years later the Normans welcomed the troops of Charles VII and passed finally under French sway. Proud of its past, proud also of its provincialisms and local peculiarities, Normandy was nevertheless French in feeling and interests, and grew more French with time under the unifying force of the absolute monarchy, the Revolution, and the modern republic. It ceased to be a duchy in 1467; it ceased to be even a political division with the creation of the modern departments in 1790. Its last survival as an area recognized by the government, the ecclesiastical province of Rouen, disappeared with the final separation of church and state in 1905. The only unity which its five departments now retain is that of the history and tradition of a common past—of a petite patrie now swallowed up in the nation.
Only at one point did the old Normandy really maintain itself against the forces of centralization, namely in the Channel Islands, those "bits of France fallen into the sea and picked up by England," as Victor Hugo calls them. These were not conquered by Philip
