ABSTRACT
IN the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church alone remained standing. It was towards her that the peoples directed their hopes.
In Gaul her organization remained intact save, for one moment, on the frontiers stormed by the Barbarians. Ecclesiastical geography survives; not only the city and the the diocese but even the province, the see of the metropoli tan, though it disappears in the civil organization. Thanks to the conversion of Clovis, the Catholic Church succeeds even in routing Arianism, and attempts the conversion of the Germans to Christianity.
