There was a great contrast, both in their character and in the reception afforded to them, between the earlier and the later works of M. Fustel. He gained his reputation, in 1864, by his _Cité Antique_, a book wherein, unlike his later insistence on the complexity of institutions, he used one simple idea--that of the religion of the family--to solve most of the problems presented by ancient civilisation. It gained immediately an extraordinary success; especially in England, where it fell in with all that current of thought which was then beginning to turn into the direction of social evolution, comparative politics, and the like. For a year or so, the final piece of advice which schoolmasters gave to men who were going up for scholarships at the Universities was to read the _Cité Antique_. Then for several years M. Fustel was not heard from, at any rate in England; although it might have been seen by occasional articles in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ and elsewhere that he was devoting himself to the early Middle Ages. In 1875 appeared the first volume of a _Histoire des Institutions politiques de l’ancienne France_, reaching to the end of the Merovingian period. But further investigation and the controversy to which the book gave rise made him resolve to go over the ground again more minutely in a series of volumes. Meanwhile he issued in 1885 his _Recherches sur quelques problèmes d’histoire_. With the modest declaration that before attempting to write the history of feudalism--“un corps infiniment vaste, à organes multiples, à faces changeantes, à vie complexe”--it was necessary to consider some preliminary questions, he threw down the gauntlet to the dominant school. He challenged the whole theory of primitive German life which was fondly supposed to rest on the authority of Cæsar and Tacitus; he showed how little evidence there was for the supposed existence of popular courts of justice; he traced the growth of the class of _coloni_ or semi-servile peasants under the later Roman empire, in a way which suggested that they must have played a far more important part in subsequent social development than is usually assigned to them; and, finally, he denied altogether the existence of that free, self-governing village community with common ownership of the village lands, which Maurer had made familiar to us as the _mark_. His antagonism to German scholars was evidently sharpened by national antipathy: like his countrymen in many other departments of science, he was bent on proving that France could beat Germany with its own peculiar instruments of patient scholarship and minute research. It is turning the tables with a vengeance, when the Frenchman shakes his head, with much apparent reason, over the inexplicable rashness of his German brethren.