Page:EB1911 - Volume 26.djvu/887

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THIELMANN—THIERRY
847


about the same period 65°. The rainfall averages about 70 in. for the year. The chief crops are rice, cotton, sesamum, tea in the hills, and thanat, the leaf of a tree used for the wrapper of the Burma, or “green” cheroot. Cotton cloth was formerly much more generally manufactured than it now is, and a coarse country paper is also made. Other industries are merely of articles for local use. The government cart road to Lashio passes through the centre of the state, and from this various unmetalled roads radiate to different parts of the state and the neighbouring states. The Mandalay-Kunlông railway, now open as far as Lashio, also passes through the capital. Teak forests exist along the banks of the Nam Tu and in the Möng Lông states, but both have been practically exhausted, and will have to be closed for many years. Previous to the annexation, and in a general way still, the state is administered by the sawbwa, or chief, aided by a council of six amats or ministers. Under them are a number of nè-baings, who are in charge of circles and townships. Each nè-baing has an asiyin, or clerk, and each village has a headman, or kin-man. The amats supervise the administration of a certain number of districts. The old system is now being assimilated to that followed in Burma. The chief Sao Hkè was for a time in England.


THIELMANN, JOHANN ADOLF, Freiherr von (1765-1824), Prussian cavalry soldier, was born at Dresden. Entering the Saxon cavalry in 1782, he saw service against the French in the Revolutionary Wars and in the Jena campaign. When, after the disaster of Jena, Saxony allied herself with her conqueror, Thielmann accompanied the Saxon contingent which fought at the siege of Danzig and at Friedland. In 1809, as colonel of a Free-Corps, he opposed the advance of the Austrians into Saxony, and was rewarded for his services with the grade of major-general, further promotion to lieutenant-general following in 1810. As commander of the Saxon Heavy Cavalry Brigade he took part in the advance on Moscow two years later, and his conduct at Borodino attracted the attention of Napoleon, who took Thielmann into his own suite. His own sovereign at the same time made him Freiherr. In the war of Liberation Thielmann took a prominent part; as governor of Torgau, by his king's orders he at first observed the strictest neutrality, but on receipt of an order to hand over the fortress to the French he resigned his command and, accompanied by his staff officer Aster, joined the allies. As a Russian general he was employed in reorganizing the Saxon army after Leipzig, and in 1814 he commanded the Saxon corps operating in the Low Countries. Early in the following year he became a lieutenant-general in the Prussian service, and in command of the 3rd army corps he took part in the Waterloo campaign. From the field of Ligny he retired with the rest of Blücher's army on Wavre, and when the other corps marched towards Waterloo, Thielmann covered this movement against Grouchy, fighting the spirited action of Wavre (June 18-19). He was later a corps commander at Münster and at Coblenz, and at the latter place he died in 1824.

See von Hütel, Biographische Skizze des Generals von Thielmann (Berlin, 1828); von Holzendorff, Beiträge zur Biographie des Generals Freiherrn von Thielmann (Dresden, 1830); von Petersdorf, General Johann Adolf Freiherr von Thielmann (Leipzig, 1894).


THIERRY, the name of two French historians, the brothers Augustin and Amédée, both of whom, though their literary and historical powers were far from being equal, displayed the same devotion to historical study.

I. Jacques Nicolas Augustin Thierry (1795-1856), the elder and more gifted, was born at Blois on the 10th of May 1795. He had no advantages of birth or fortune, but was greatly distinguished at the Blois Grammar School, and entered the École normale supérieure (1811). In 1813 he left it, and was sent as a professor to Compiègne, but stayed there a very short time. His ardent and generous nature led him to embrace the ideas of the French Revolution with enthusiasm, and he became fired with Saint Simon's ideal society of the future. He became the secretary, and, as he would say himself, the “adopted son” of the famous visionary (1814-17); but, while most of Saint Simon's followers turned their attention to the affairs of life, devoting themselves to the problems, both theoretical and practical, of political economy, Thierry turned his to history. His imagination had been powerfully impressed by reading Les Martyrs, in which Chateaubriand had contrasted the two civilizations and the two races from which the modern world has sprung. His romantic ardour was later still further nourished by the works of Sir Walter Scott, and though he did not himself actually write romances, his conception of history fully recognized the dramatic element. His main ideas on the Germanic invasions, the Norman Conquest, the formation of the Communes, the gradual ascent of the nations towards free government and parliamentary institutions are already observable in the articles contributed by him to the Censeur européen (1817-20), and later in his Lettres sur l'histoire de France (1820). From Fauriel he learnt to use the original authorities; and by the aid of the Latin chronicles and the collection, as yet very ill understood, of the Anglo-Saxon laws, he composed his Histoire de la Conquête de l'Angleterre par les Normands, the appearance of which was greeted with great enthusiasm (1825). It was written in a style at once precise and picturesque, and was dominated by an idea, at once generous and false, that of Anglo-Saxon liberty resisting the invasions of northern barbarians, and reviving, in spite of defeat, in the parliamentary monarchy. His artistic talent as a writer makes the weaknesses and deficiencies of his scholarship less obvious. This work, the preparation of which had required several years of hard work, cost Thierry his eyesight; in 1826 he was obliged to engage secretaries and in 1850 became quite blind. Notwithstanding, he continued to produce works. In 1827 he republished his Lettres sur l'histoire de France, with the addition of fifteen new ones, in which he described some of the more striking episodes in the history of the rise of the medieval communes. The chronicles of the 11th and 12th centuries and a few communal charters provided him, without requiring a great amount of erudition, with materials for a solid work. For this reason his work on the communes has not become so out of date as his Norman Conquest; but he was too apt to generalize from the facts furnished by a few striking cases which occurred in a small portion of France, and helped to spread among the public, and even among professional historians, mistaken ideas concerning one of the most complex problems relating to the social origins of France.

Thierry was ardent in his applause of the July Revolution and the triumph of liberal ideas; at this time, too, his brother Amédée was appointed prefect, and he went to live with him for four years. He now re-edited, under the title of Dix ans d'études historiques, his first essays in the Censeur européen and the Courrier français (1834), and composed his Récits des temps mérovingiens, in which he reproduced in a vivid and dramatic form some of the most characteristic stories of Gregory of Tours. These Récits appeared first in the Revue des deux mondes; when collected in volume form, they were preceded by long and interesting Considérations sur l'histoire de France. From the 7th of May 1830, Thierry had already been a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres; in 1841, on the motion of Villemain, the French Academy awarded him the first Prix Gobert, which became a kind of literary inheritance for him, being renewed in his favour fifteen years in succession. Moreover, he had been allotted the task of publishing in the series of the Documents inédits a selection of acts bearing on the history of the Third Estate. By the aid of zealous collaborators (including Bourquelot and Louandre) he compiled, in four volumes, a valuable Recueil des monuments inédits de l'histoire du Tiers État (1850-70), which, however, bear only on the northern part of France. The preface appeared afterwards in a separate volume under the title of Histoire du Tiers État. To Thierry belongs the credit for inaugurating in France the really critical study of the communal institutions, and we cannot make him responsible for the neglect into which it relapsed after his death. The last years of his life were clouded by domestic griefs and by illness. In 1844 he lost his wife, Julie de Quérengal, an intelligent woman, who had been to him a collaborator as capable as she was devoted. The revolution of 1848 inflicted on him a final blow.